Into the life of Jay's peaceful administration came another interesting character, the champion of every project known to the inventive genius of his day. We shall hear much of Samuel Latham Mitchill during the next three decades. He was now thirty-five years old, a sort of universal eccentric genius, already known as philosopher, scientist, teacher, and critic, a professor in Columbia, the friend of Joseph Priestley, the author of scientific essays, and the first in America to make mineralogical explorations. Perhaps if he had worked in fewer fields he might have won greater renown, making his name familiar to the general student of our own time; but he belonged to an order of intellect far higher than most of his associates, filling the books with his doings and sayings. Although his influence, even among specialists, has probably faded now, he inspired the scientific thought of his time, and established societies which still exist, and whose history, up to the time of his death in 1831, was largely his own. Mitchill belonged to the Republican party because it was the party of Jefferson, and he followed Jefferson because Jefferson was a philosopher. For the same reason he became the personal friend of Chancellor Livingston, with whom, among other things, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Manufactures, and the Useful Arts. It was said of Mitchill that "he was equally at home in studying the geology of Niagara, or the anatomy of an egg; in offering suggestions as to the angle of a windmill, or the shape of a gridiron; in deciphering a Babylonian brick, or in advising how to apply steam to navigation."