an actual mitre or the figure of one was sometimes carried, and sometimes suspended over the tomb” (Report on the Ornaments of the Church, p. 106). The liturgical use of the mitre was revived in the Church of England in the latter part of the 19th century, and is now fairly widespread.
3. Oriental Rites.—Some form of liturgical head-dress is common to all the Oriental rites. In the Orthodox Eastern Church the mitre (Gr. μίτρα; Slav. mitra) is, as in the Western Church, proper only to bishops. Its form differs entirely from that of the Latin Church. In general it rather resembles a closed crown, consisting of a circlet from which rise two arches intersecting each other at right angles. Circlet and arches are richly chased and jewelled; they are filled out by a cap of stiff material, often red velvet, ornamented with pictures in embroidery or appliqué metal. Surmounting all, at the intersection of the arches is a cross. In Russia this usually lies flat, only certain metropolitans, and by prescription the bishops of the eparchy of Kiev, having the right to have the cross upright (see fig. 2). In the Armenian Church priests and archdeacons, as well as the bishops, wear a mitre. That of the bishops is of the Latin form, a custom dating from a grant of Pope Innocent III.; that of the priests, the sagvahart, is not unlike the Greek mitre (see fig. 3). In the Syrian Church only the patriarch wears a mitre, which resembles that of the Greeks. The biruna of the Chaldaean Nestorians, on the other hand, worn by all bishops, is a sort of hood ornamented with a cross. Coptic priests and bishops wear the ballin, a long strip of stuff ornamented with crosses &c., and wound turban-wise round the head; the patriarch of Alexandria has a helmet-like mitre, the origin of which is unknown, though it perhaps antedates the appearance of the phrygium at Rome. The Maronites, and the uniate Jacobites, Chaldaeans and Copts have adopted the Roman mitre.
 Drawn from a photograph taken by Father J. Braun (reproduced in Die liturgische Gewandung). By permission of B. Herder. Fig. 2—Greek Mitre. |
 From Braun’s Liturgische Gewandung. By permis- Fig. 3—Mitre of Armenian Priest. |
 Reproduced by kind permission of the Archbishop of Westminster. Fig. 4—Mitra pretiosa of the late Cardinal Vaughan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. |
The mitre was only introduced into the Greek rite in comparatively modern times. It was unknown in the earlier part of the 15th century, but had certainly been introduced by the beginning of the 16th. Father Braun suggests that its assumption by the Greek patriarch was connected with the changes due to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. Possibly, as its form suggests, it is based on the imperial crown and symbolized at the outset the quasi-sovereignty over the rayah population which Mahommed II. was content to leave to the patriarch. In 1589 it was introduced into Russia, when the tsar Theodore erected the Russian patriarchate and bestowed on the new patriarch the right to wear the mitre, sakkos and mandyas, all borrowed from the Greek rite. A hundred years later the mitre, originally confined to the patriarch, was worn by all bishops.
See J. Braun, S.J., Die liturgische Gewandung (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1907), pp. 424–498. The question of the use of the mitre in the Anglican Church is dealt with in the Report of the Sub-Committee of the Convocation of Canterbury on the Ornaments of the Church and its Ministers (1908). See also the bibliography to the article Vestments. (W. A. P.)
MITROVICA (Hungarian, Mitrovicz; German, Mitrowitz), a town of Croatia-Slavonia, Hungary, situated on the river
Save, in the county of Syrmia. Pop. (1900), 11,518. Mitrovica
is on the railway from Agram, 170 m. W.N.W. to Belgrade,
38 m. E. by S. Roman remains have been discovered in its
neighbourhood, and it occupies the site of Sirmium or Syrmium,
the chief city of Lower Pannonia under Roman rule. The
emperor Probus (232–282) was born and buried at Sirmium,
where, according to some authorities, the emperor Marcus
Aurelius (121–180) also died; but this is uncertain. In 351, 357
and 358, ecclesiastical councils of some importance met at
Sirmium, which became an episcopal see about 305, and was
united with the diocese of Bosnia in 1773. The city was
sacked by the Huns in 441, and by the Turks, who destroyed
all its ancient buildings, in 1396 and 1521.
MITSCHERLICH, EILHARDT (1794–1863), German chemist,
was born on the 7th of January 1794 at Neuende near Jever, in the grand duchy of Oldenburg, where his father was pastor. His uncle, Christoph Wilhelm Mitscherlich (1760–1854), professor at Göttingen, was in his day a celebrated scholar. He was educated at Jever under the historian F. C. Schlosser, when he went to Heidelberg in 1811, devoted himself to philology, giving special attention to the Persian language. In 1813 he went to Paris to obtain permission to join the embassy which Napoleon I. was to send to Persia. The events of 1814 put an end to this, and Mitscherlich resolved to study medicine in order that he might enjoy that freedom of travel usually allowed in the East to physicians. He began at Göttingen with the study of chemistry, and this so arrested his attention that he gave up the journey to Persia. From his Göttingen days dates the treatise on certain parts of Persian history, compiled from MSS. in the university library and published in Persian and Latin in 1814, under the title Mirchondi historia Thaheridarum historicis nostris hucusque incognitorum Persiae principum. In 1818 he went to Berlin and worked in the laboratory of H. F. Link (1767–1851). There he made analyses of phosphates and phosphites, arsenates and arsenites, confirming the conclusions of J. J. Berzelius as to their composition; and his observation that corresponding phosphates and arsenates crystallize in the same form was the germ from which grew the theory of isomorphism which he communicated to the Berlin Academy in December 1819. In that year Berzelius suggested Mitscherlich to the minister Altenstein as successor to M. H. Klaproth at Berlin. Altenstein did not immediately carry out this proposal, but he obtained for Mitscherlich a government grant to enable him to continue his studies in Berzelius’s laboratory at Stockholm. He returned to Berlin in 1821, and in the summer of 1822 he delivered his first lecture as extraordinary professor of chemistry in the university, where in 1825 he was appointed ordinary professor. In the course of an investigation into the slight differences discovered by W. H. Wollaston in the angles of the rhombohedra of the carbonates isomorphous with calc-spar, he observed that the angle in the case of calc-spar varied with the temperature. On extending his inquiry to other aelotropic crystals he observed a similar variation, and was thus led, in 1825, to the discovery that aelotropic crystals, when heated, expand unequally in the direction of dissimilar axes. In the following year he discovered the change, produced by change of temperature, in the direction of the optic axes of selenite. His investigation (also in 1826) of the two crystalline modifications of sulphur threw much light on the fact that the two minerals calc-spar and aragonite have the same composition but different crystalline forms, a property which Mitscherlich called dimorphism. In 1833 he made a series of careful determinations of the vapour densities of a large
