“The first impression of enlightened strangers [of the university] is uniformly favorable, but when we show them our library and inform them that we have little or no philosophical apparatus, we sink even more than is reasonable in their estimation.”

-- Elisha Mitchell, Professor of Mathematics and Natural History at the University of North Carolina, 1824

 

Source: Kemp Plummer Battle, History of the University of North Carolina. Volume I: From Its Beginnings to the Death of President Swain, 1789-1868. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1907, p. 281.

Image source: A Memoir of the Rev. Elisha Mitchell, D. D., Late Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy & Geology in the University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill: J.M. Henderson, Printer to the University, 1858. Frontispiece.