MEETING # 1407

4:00 P.M.

March 13, 1986

An Unforgettable Scientist,
The Life of Louis Agassiz

by Charles D. Howell Ph.D.

Assembly Room, A. K. Smiley Public Library

Abstract

Louis Agassiz was America's leading scientist in the mid-nineteenth century. He proposed the Theory of Ice Ages, and contributed greatly to ideas of geological succession and taxonomy and to the theory of embryonic recapitulation. All these had a profound influence on the thinking of Charles Darwin, helping convince him of the truth of the theory of evolution. Agassiz , unfortunately, was bound from his youth to the theory of catastrophism of his mentor Baron Georges Cuvier, Napoleon's Chief of Science. So, he could not agree with Darwin. In spite of this.he had a tremendous influence on the development of literature in promoting the love of nature so characteristic of that time. His closest friend, outside of scientific circles, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous poem, "The Chambered Nautilus" was inspired by Agassiz.  He also profoundly influenced the patterns of laboratory teaching of biology of the past century, and directly inspired a generation of teachers of biology, and indirectly several generations since, including the author and his teachers, all of whom hive been evolutionists.

Biography of the Author

Prophets Agassiz was the Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov of pre-civil war America. He was born in Motier, Switzerland, May 28, 1807, and named Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, and was known to his European family and friends as Louis. But in America he was known to everyone simply as Agassiz. Even his America wife never called him by any other game. !

Louis Agassiz left behind students who became teachers and research workers who aimed, like him, to stimulate others to learn in the Agassiz manner, "from nature, not books". His -eminent work on fishes was carried on in America by David Starr Jordan, whom\remember especially as President of Stanford University. One student, W. K. Brooks, worked with him int~exhuberating atmos~hereiof the marine school on Penikese Island, Agassiz's last summer. Be carried the Agassiz method to The Johns Hopkins University, heading the first science department in America entitled, ''Department of Biology. Brooks passed the inspiration to Ross Harrison, whose techniques were used in the development of the polio vaccine seventy-five years later. He also passed it to Thomas Hunt Morgan, pioneer American geneticist., who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the heredity of the fruit fly.

Fourteen college generations after his death his name and methods were still being invoked to signify inspired biological effort. I heard it at Oberlin College, ad again at Johns Hopkins. His methods became the foundation for the type of laboratory work we carried on there# in Which students saw first-hand, and dissected, specimens written about in books. Nature was first, books second. No wonder I looked forward to learning more about Louis Agassiz.

I was twelve years out of college before I had the first opportunity to study the life of this great mane In a post-graduate seminar on the history of biology in America, I drew the assignment on the lives of Louis and Alexander Agassiz, father and son. This was at the University of Rochester. I learned then that Agassiz was not only an inspiring leader and triumphant figure, but in some ways also a tragic one. Now forty years later, I pass this on to you.

Louis was born in Motier, Switzerland. His father was the last in a long line of Protestant Ministers steaming from the Reformation. His mother came from the Mayor family noted for its physicians and prominent businessmen. He and his brother here great fisherman, but not always with a hook and line. They were   noted for catching fish with their bare hands. lie began a notebook with cats on fish with accurate figures Then he was twelve years old, and claims he learned~all he knew about fish before he was fifteen. Not only did they collect, but learned about the habits of fish. No wonder he became the outstanding authority on fish in later life.

Although he got a unique education from nature, it was not his only education. He was an extraordinary scholar with a fine memory. He learned to converse in Latin, as well as in^German and English. As a boy he WAS noted for ~ manual dexterity and his fine handicraft. He was a skillful cobbler, and even made shoes for his sister's dolls. He was complimented for the fine watertight barrels he could construct.

He was also very daring. a story is told of his crossing an icefield with his brother and sighting a fissure. He lay down across it, and let his smaller brother walk across it over his body. As a mountain climber and climber of glaciers he was inexhaustible.  After one experience with him on a glacier is is said his guide went home with shattered nerves.

He became a handsome young man, with resolute, commanding features, and fascinating eyes. His eloquence, brilliance: and persuasiveness are legion. One story illustrates this. He and his brother were hitch-hiking home from college.a wealthy man picked them up and was so captivated by his conversations with Louis that he tried to adopt him, offering his family a large sum of money' and guaranteeing his education. This was, of course turned dowdy.

His family, not being wealthy, had to appeal to relatives to assist in his education. They tried to direct him into a business career, but this conflicted with his natural interests and was a cause of some family strife. In spite of this, and with some help from his Uncle; a doctor, he got to the University of Zurich, then the University of Heidelberg, and finally to the University of Munich where he was presumably a student of medicine.

Very influential at Munich was the embryologist, Dollinger, in  whose house he and some friends lived. Much of "Agassiz's later work was to be in embryology. They also studied under Oken, the famous professor of Naturphilosophie. This, the students decided was unscientific. They formed their own "Little Academy", which met in Agassiz's room where they discussed their latest idea. They were more interested in nature than medicine, and were constantly collecting things. It is said they had forty birds in their room at one time, / besides fish, and mammals.

The collections became so great that the,- had to get Louis's uncle, and later his grandfather,to set aside rooms in their homes to house the excess specimens. fit this time he was presented with a complete collection of fishes from  Brazil for his study. Without telling his family of this fact, he begged them to allow him to pursue the study of natural} history alone for one year, with the promise that he would return to medicine the following year. This was granted, and in that year he completed his study of these fish and won his Ph. D. with such distinction that the faculty awarded the degree without requiring the customary oral examination. So he could publish the tremendous work, signing Ph.D. after his name, in 1539

Now he returned to medicine~and was awarded the M.D. the following year with distinction. He even returned home and tried to practice medicine, but he couldn't stop collecting fish. At this time the Museum of Munich gave him another collection of E¢European fish. To work on these he had to have artists to make drawings. Early in life he relied on his sister. In college he won ~ loyal fliers to be his artist for twenty years. This was Joseph Denkel (Dinkel) who was left behind only when Agassiz went abroad to America.

For some time he had desired to work with Georges Cuvier in Paris. Cuvier was the world's outstanding comparative anatomist   and paleontologist at that time. He too was a Huguenot. He had been Napoleon Bonaparte's scientist, and retained his position after Napoleoleon's exile,ln spite of his religion, because of his tremendous renown. Louis's excuse for leaving for Paris with Dinkel was, the best medicine follows the best museums. This was 1830.

In Paris he was stricken with poverty, but carried on his work, and with such distinction, that Cuvier turned over all his fish collections to him. The two men had much in common, sharing a catastrophic concept of the origin of species. This began with the biblical story of Noah's flood, but quickly they realized that this could not account for the number of catastrophes they found in the Geological record. Nevertheless, both firmly continued to believe that species were fixed and immutable, created by God where they were found. This happy association was terminated when an epidemic struck Paris in 1832, taking the life of Cuvier. His last words to Agassiz were, "Be careful, remember, work kills."  Louis never heeded this advice.

Two things now called him back to Switzerland, but he left Dinkel behind in Paris making drawings. First, he was called to be the first Professor of Natural History and Geology at the new University of Neuchatel. Second, he returned to marry Cecile Braun, sister of his best friend. She also had been involved in making drawings for him, and some of the finest lithographs in his works were done by her.

One wonders what would have happened in Paris if Agassiz had not met Alexander von Humboldt, the famous German geographer and oceanographer, who was at the height of his fame at that time. The two men had a meeting of minds, and Humboldt became as a second father to Louis. In addition to intellectual stimulation, he also helped Louis and Dinkel financially.

Back in Switzerland, Louis pursued his adventures with glaciers. Trying to solve a problem, the presence of erratic boulders on glaciers, he explored glaciers on Mt. Aar, Mt. Blanc, the Matterhorn and others, He c&me to a most controversial conclusion, that an ice sheet had covered all of northern Europe in ancient times. Even Humboldt was skeptical of this at first. He repeated 09 observaion9 in Scotland, convincing one of his critics of the validity of his theory, which suddenly won the day, being accepted and bringing great honor to him. Both Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, and Charles Darwin applauded this, considering his thinking kaleidoscopic.

Agassiz met Lyell at this time, and Lyell later wrote how impressed he was with Agassiz's insights into Paleontological history. At this time Lyell had no thought of evolution. He was pleased to be the Geologist who wrote Agassiz , notifying him that he had won the Wollaston Prize.

The precision of Agassiz's observations is illustrated by a singular event. A family had lost a member who had fallen into a crevasse on a glacier. They sought Louis's help to recover the body for a Christian burial. Louis studied the site, and calculated the date when the body would emerge at the melting edge of the glacier. It should be noted that this involved a totally new concept, for before this time glaciers were thought to be immobile. The family camped below the glacier on the appointed date and did recover the body as predicted.

Agassiz had gained eminence at age 22. Approaching forty, his contributions were worthy of a Nobel Prize, if it had been in existence. Be was, instead, invited to give the Lowell Lectures in Boston, and was given a grant by Frederick III of Prussia to study the natural history of the United States. He prepared to leave for America. He first gave his Lowell lectures a trial run in Neuchatel, entitling them, "The plan of Creation". In them his philosophy of nature appears. The origin of this is expressed in poetic form by William Wadsworth Longfellow' written ten years later in honor of his fiftieth birthday. Be is imagining the childhood of Agassiz:

And Nature , the old nurse took
The child upon her knee,
Saying, "Here is a story-book
Thy Father has written for thee.
Come, wander with me," she said,
"Into the region yet untrod,
And read what is still unread
In the manuscript of God."

In that ten years he had adopted America and America claimed him. They were turbulent years, his wife dying of T.B. months before he learned of it. He married Elizabeth Cary, known as ''Lizzie", an eminent woman in her own right, who later became the founding President of Radcliffe College. His children came to America and were brought up by Lizzie.

His breadth and depth of knowledge astonished everyone. Wealthy men determined to keep him in America and financed a position to fit him in the newly created Lawrence School of Theoretical and Practical Science at Harvard. He was to be Professor of Zoology and-Geology. He traveled the length and breadth of the country, so in demand, that second appearances had to be made often to satisfy crowds which came to hear him lecture. When the Civil War broke out he became an American citizen.

In the meantime he not only had won the Wollaston Prize, but also the Wollaston Medal, and the Cuvier Prize in parts, as well as the Legion of Honor. He was also elected to the Royal Society of London, and later given their highest honor, the Copley Medal. IN America there were no such awards for scientists, but he was active in supporting Joseph Henry in establishing our National Academy of Sciences, and was an active member of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute.

He loved his students and taught them that "A physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle."' He also taught that all knowledge he obtained was but a revelation of the working of the mind of God. Yet he was not a biblical literalist, but merely believed he saw God in nature as much as in the Bible. He had developed his own nature-philosophy, in spite of believing that Omen's nauturphilosophie was unscientific.

He had tremendous inductive capacities, and they offered insights into areas of biology (This word was still not much in use yet). But his insights were grasped better by others than by himself. He studied in detail the embryology of Echinoderms  (starfish and their relatives), Molluscs, Fish and Turtles. In all of them he pointed out that the embryological development of higher forms contains features seen in adults of lower forms. He carried this further than we are wont to do today, writing "So striking is the resemblance of the young of higher animals to the full-grown of lower types, that it has been assumed by many writers that all the higher animals pass, during the earlier stages of their growth , through phases corresponding to the permanent constitution of the lower classes."

Furthermore, he saw these types in the fossil records, and correlated the lower and higher fossils in a remarkable evolutionary sequence,but totally denied the evolutionary concept of genetic relationship. Yet he wrote, "there is a manifest progress in the succession of' being on the surface of the earth"...' especially in their increasing resemblance to man". He concluded only that God had the higher forms in mind when he created the lower ones.

Leconte, one-time student of Agassiz and later an eminent biologist wrote, : I think it can be shown that/Agassiz, more than any other man, is due the credit of having established the laws of succession of living forms in the geological history of the earth... also that to him, more than to any other man, is due the credit of having perfected the methods by use of which (The comparative embryological method) biological science has advanced 80 rapidly." That was in the late 19th century.

He pointed out further that Agassiz had brought together the classification of animals, their embryological development, and their geological order. "The one grand idea underlying Agassiz's whole life-work was the essential identity of the three series, and therefore the light which they must shed on each other." Agassiz built the structure of evolution but called it development, denying the possibility of hereditary continuity in the living world.

Great minds can only go so far from their roots. Creative men have limits as do ordinary men. They can see amazing new things, and fail to grasp the next step. It so happened to Priestley, also an adopted American, who, handcuffed by his ideas of Phlogiston, could not understand oxidation; and it happened to Agassiz shackled to the idea of Creationism.

1859 was a critical year. Humboldt, his great supporter, died, and Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published bed. Although Agassiz could not accept evolution, his criticism of it way far less devastating than expected. He admonished his students not to be prejudiced against Darwin, and they were not. He never did publish a scientific critique of Darwin's work, md most of his associates wished he had~second thoughts about evolution. His close friend, Wyman quote him as saying, " If I were a comparative anatomist, as you are, I should probably think as you do. But I cannot accept this new doctrine consistently with the views I have already put forth.~' However, he also added, "and I do not intend to''.

He could not imagine that God might create new things by a process of natural mutation. Of course such an idea as not known to Darwin either. And Mendel's work on genetics, though written before both men died, was incomprehensible to all biologists till the 20th century.

J. S. Packard, one of his student quotes him as saying at one time, "the greatest mistake of my scientific life has been combating the theory of evolution. I saw it coming for years and my Essay on Classification was written largely to forestall it. I believe it all wrong, but not I see it will prevail."

 This had little influence on leadership in America. The scope of his collections and publications continued to grow, and to involve more people and space than he could afford. It was an old story. He was constantly in debt, and in the nick of time a philanthropist would bail him out. He inveigled the State Legislature to support him, as well as getting money from the University ~d friends. His wife even ran a school for girls to help pay the bills. Later on their families become his supporters. But the greatest support for his project was to come from his own 900, Alexander, who as a mining engineer (as well as biologist) became a multi-millionaire from copper interests.

The Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Harvard, started in empty barns, now is still prominent and is fondly called The Agassiz Museum to this day.

Through  the Saturday Club of Boston, be had a great influence on literati of the Golden Age of American Literature. Emerson had a custom of inviting bright people to his home for dinner. Under Agassiz's influence this expanded into a group meeting regularly at Parker's Coffee House,each Saturday. They began eating at 3 p.m. and remained together, without a set agenda, for hours, sometimes past midnight. The membership of the group varied from year to year, but included at some time: James Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana, James Russell Lowell, Benjamin Pierce, Sumner and Hoar, who were members of President Lincoln is cabinet, Andrew (Governor of Massachusetts), Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles William James, Francis Adams Francis Parkman and others. Thoreau gathered specimens for him.

It is possible that the adulation of this group blinded Agassiz to scientific reality of the outside world. He seems unto wined by contemporary science. Yet in spite of his opinion on evolution, as Lowell wrote, he lived on "In minds touched with firet~by his towering personality .

Many more poems were written about him or as a result of his lectures than is popularly known. The best known is "The Chambered Nautilus", written by Holmes after one of Agassiz's inspiring talks on nature. It has been quoted by many,a teacher and preacher, and been memorized by many a student looking for inspiration for life's work. Most of us can quote it:

Build thee more stately mansions, oh, my soul
As the swift seasons roll!' leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with redone more vast,
'Till thou at length are free, Leaving this outgrown shell by life's unresting sea.

In spite of a stroke in 1868 he continued his tumultuous life. In 1873 he pushed an idea he had long cherished, to have a summer school for nature education by the sea. A wealthy businessman reading about it in the New York Times gave him major financial support and that summer an exciting school was held on the Island of Penikese. It served as the forerunner of the famous Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, now perhaps the world's greatest Marine Laboratory. The exuberance at Penikese brought many of his former students together, with new ones to be inspired. The high spirit of the event lead John Greenleaf Whittier to pen "The Prayer of Agassiz" from which these few lines are taken"

On the Isle of Penikese,
Hinged with sapphire seas,
Fanned by breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school....
Said the Master to the youth
Owe have come in search of Truth....
We are reaching , through His Laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause."....

Agassiz's enthusiast made it a success in spite of difficulties in the circumstances of running and building the school. Without his influence, putt- turf it perished, although the idea Has revived years later and incorporated in the Marine Biological Laboratory-on the Mainland, a much more suitable spot.

He was adored as much at home as in the public eye. His wife wrote, "I can never tell anyone how delightful it was to live by the side of a mind so fresh and original, so prodigal of its intellectual capital." In their companionship she lived for twenty year, "a life that grew daily fuller and richer in happiness."

His son and close associates referred to him as a "steam engine". The steam gave out on Dec. 14, 1873, after another stroke, this time paralyzing his tongue. He son had a rough granite boulder brought from his favorite site, the Glacier of Air. On it he had cut three words:

LOUIS AGASSIZ
TEACHER

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agassiz, Elizabeth Cary. 1886. Louis Agassiz, his life and correspondence.3 vols.
Hougton, Mifflin, Boston.

Agassiz, Louis. 1863. Methods of study in natural history .
Ticknor and Fields, Boston.

1857-1862. Contributions to the natural history of the United States of America. Little, Brown and Co.Boston.

" . 1874. Evolution and permanence of types. Atlantic Monthly, 33 (January).

Cooper, Lane. 1917. Louis Agassiz as a teacher. Comstock, Ithaca.

Jordan, David Starr. 1892. Agassiz at Penikese. Popular Science Monthly, 40: 721_729.

Lurie, Edward. 1960. Louis Agassiz, a life in science. Univ. Chi.

Lyman, Theodore. 1874. Recollections of Louis Agassiz. Atlantic Monthly, 33:221-229.

Teller, James D. 1947. Louis Agassiz and men of letters. Scientific Monthly : 428-432.

Tharp, Louise Hall. 1959. Adventurous alliance, the story of the Agassiz family of Boston. Little, Brown and Co.

 Agassiz's Fortnightly Club

In addition to the distinguished Saturday Club, Louis Agassiz also belonged to a club which met fortnightly, and was called The Friday Club. This club may have been composed more of his executive friends -businessmen and publishers, etc. The club was a dinner club, limited to twelve members.

Consult James D. Teller, "Loui4Agassiz and Men of Letters", Scientific Monthly, 1947 pp 428-432, for lists of membership in both the Friday Club and the Saturday Club of Boston

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes. This poem was written after an inspiring presentation about the biology of this Mollusk. It is essentially a squid or cuttlefish with a shell that is prized for its beauty.

This is the ship of pearl, which poets feign
Sails the unshadow'd main -
The venturous bark that flings
On sweet Sumner wind its purple wings,
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living graze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the chip of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
A's the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed -
Its iris 'd ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed.

Year after year Held the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still as the spiral grew.
We 'oft the past yearn dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step the shining archways through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found hole, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly  message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings, -

Build thee more stately mansions, oh, my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea.

THE FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY OF AGASSIZ

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. One of at least three poems read at Agassiz's birthday celebration before the Saturday Club. Ralph We Emerson records the event in his journal, "The flower of the feast we the reading of three poems, written by our three poet<, for the occasion. The first by Longfellow, .. the second by Holmes; the third by Lowell...

It was fifty years ago
In the pleasant month of May,
In the beautiful Pays de Vaud, A child in cradle lay.

And Nature, the old nurse, took
The child upon her knee,
Saying: "Here is a story -book
Thy Father has written for thee."

'Rome wander with me," she said,
"Into the regions yet untrod,
And read what is still unlead
In the manuscript of God."

And he wandered away and away
With Nature, the dear old nurse,
Who sang to him night and day
The rhymes of the universe.

And whenever the way seemed long,
Or his heart began to fail,
She would sing a more wonderful song,
or tell a more marvellous tale.

So she keeps him still a child,
And will not let him go,
Though at times his heart beats wild
For the beautiful Pays du Vaud

Tho' at times he hears in his dreams
The Ranz des Vaches of old,
And the rush of mountain streams,
From the glaciers clear and cold.

And the mother at home says, "Hark!
For the voice I listen and yearn;
It is growing late and dark,
And my boy does not return."

May 28, 1957

THE PRAYER OF AGASSIZ

By John Greenleaf Whittier, on the event of opening the Penikese School, July 1873, near Woods Hale, Mass.

On the Isle of Penikese,
Ringed about by sapphire seas,
Panned by breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school

Said the Master to the youth:
"We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery;
We are reaching, through his laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause.
Him, the endless, unbegun,  The unnamable the One,
Light of all the light the Source,
Life of life and Force of force.
As with fingers of the blind,
We are groping here to find
What the hieroglyphics mean
Of Unseen in the seen,
What the thought which underlies
Nature's masking and disguise,
What it is that hides beneath
Blight and bloom and birth and death.
By past efforts, loss and failing,
Of our weakness made aware,
On the threshold of our task
Let us light and guidance ask,
Let us pause in silent prayer "

Even careless heart was moved,
And the doubting gave assent
With gesture reverent,
To the taster well beloved.
As thin mists are glorified
By the light they cannot hide,
All who gazed upon him saw,
Through its veil of tender awe,
How his face was still alit
By the old sweet look of it,
Hopeful, trustful, full of cheer,
And the love that casts out fear.

Elegy to Agassiz

By James Russell Lowell

Lowell was in Italy when Agassiz died. His tribute to Agassiz covered eleven pages in the Atlantic Monthly. He writes that his appreciation of Agassiz grew as he came to know him better, and that on his death he found "This impression of Agassiz had wormed itself into my consciousness and without me knowing it had colored my whole poem." The final portion is quoted here.

We have not lost him all; he is not gone
To the dumb herd of them that wholly die;
The beauty of his better self lives
In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye
He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him
Whose living word still stimulates the air:
In endless file shall loving scholars come
The glow of his transmitted touch to share,
And trace his features with an eye less dim
Than ours whose sense familiar wont makes numb.

A LIST OF THE PUPILS OF AGASSIZ

READ nature, not books,' said Agassiz, adding: 'If you study nature in books, when you go out of-doors you cannot find her.' Upon this principle of observation he built up his school, a practical institution dealing in reality, which maturing in America at an opportune moment in our national history, directly or indirectly brought us our first seashore-laboratories, many of our great natural history museums; among them the American Museum of Natural History, the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts; as well as countless university departments of natural science, and a flourishing group of explorers of the life of the ocean.

Virtually every distinguished biologic American of the fifties, sixties, and seventies was a friend or student of Agassiz's. The roster is bright with accomplishment, even today. A diligent search in the memories of J. Walter Fewkes, of the Smithsonian Institution, and David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford Junior University (two surviving Agassiz students), supplemented by early reports of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, yields the following great, although incomplete list:

Alpheus Hyatt, of Cambridge William H. Brewer, of Yale

Addison E. Verrill, of Yale

J. Walter Fewkes, of the National Museum

Edward S. Morse, of the Salem Peabody Museum

Alexander Agassiz, of Cambridge

H. James Clark, of Cambridge

F. W. Putnam, of the Cambridge Peabody Museum and the American Museum of Natural History

Samuel H. Scudder, of the Harvard Museum

Burt G. Wilder, of Cornell

William James, the psychologist N. S. Shaler, of Harvard

John McCrady, of Sewanee, Tennessee

J. Henry Blake, hydrographer, of Cambridge Joseph Trimble Roth:

Count Pourtales, of Cambridge Sidney I. Smith, of Y.

Theodore Gill of the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress

Theodore Lyman, of Cambridge

J. A. Allen, mammalogist and ornithologist of the American Museum of Natural History

William K. Brooks, of the Johns Hopkins University

Walter Faxon, of Cambridge

Charles S. Minot, of Boston

C. O. Whitman, of Clark University and the University of Chicago

David Starr Jordan

E. A. Birge, of the University of Wisconsin

Samuel Garman, ichthyologist of the Cambridge Museum

Alpheus S. Packard, of Brown University

Charles Stimpson, of Chicago University

T. B. Stowe}l, of the Cortland State Normal School

P. R. Uhler, of the Baltimore Peabody Institute

S. M. Buck, of Cambridge

Harland Ballard, of Lenox Academy

Joseph Bassett Holder, of the American Museum of Natural History

Joseph Trimble Rothrock, of Philadelphia

Sidney I. Smith, of Yale

Henry A. Ward, of Ward's Natural Science Establishment

Frederick H. Snow, chancellor of the University of Kansas

W. O. Crosby, of Boston

Ernest Ingersoll, author of scientific books

Orestes St. John, of the Canadian Geological Survey

C. Frederick Hartt, of Cornell and Brazil

S. V. R. Thayer, of Boston

Caleb Cook, of the Salem Peabody Museum

Charles Foley, ornithologist of Canada

Henry Wheatland, of Cambridge

William Glen, of Cambridge

William N. Rice, of Middletown, Connecticut

General Albert Ordway, of Richmond, Virginia

William H. Niles, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Albert S. Bickmore, founder of the American Museum of Natural History

F. A. Sherrif, of Boston :

Edwin Norton, entomologist of Farmington, Connecticut

S. R. Jillson, of Judson, Massachusetts

W. J. Beal, of the Lansing [Michigan] Horticultural and Agricultural College

T. P. Chandler, of Cambridge

Richard Bliss, of Cambridge

Samuel Lockwood, archaeologist and geologist of Freehold, New Jersey

J. B. Perry, of Cambridge

Francis Sanborn, of Andover, Massachusetts

(Occasionally) Edward Drinker Cope

Edward Burgess, of the Normal College of the City of New York

E. T. Cresson, of Philadelphia

C. W. Bennett, of Holyoke

Edwin Bicknell, of the Salem Essex Institute

J. H. Emerton, of Boston

E. P. Austin, of Cambridge

E. C. Howe, of Yonkers, New York

Horace Mann's sons, Benjamin P., and Horace

The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University opened its doors under a grant secured · by Agassiz from the Massachusetts Legislature, and with the additional pecuniary support of Mr. Francis C. Gray, of Boston, in 1859. Nineteen students of the Harvard classes in zoology at the Lawrence Scientific School were enrolled as students and assistants. This number had increased by 1872 to one hundred and three, but the Civil War, intervening in 1861, had called many of the young men to the armies of both North and South. The early museum-reports consequently contain incomplete references to men, later lost sight of or occasionally accounted for in such notes as: Craigin, died in the army of fever. Other names without subsequent clues of identity are: Hansen; M. Gugenheim; Edward King; N. Bowditch; C. A. Shurtleff; J. H. Fowler; John Bartlett; S. C. Martin; Louis Cabot; A. R. Crandall; J. Boll (a young Swiss); Wing; and W. ]. Hubbard.

The encouragement of women students bears witness to Agassiz's open-minded attitude toward the world and education. A number of young women worked in the library and in the preparation" departments, cleaning and mounting fossil lanes and shells, classifying and arranging exhibits. Undoubtedly their maiden aunts decried the evil influence of the Civil War on the younger generation, but the fact that they did a good job stands in the museum-records, amid frequent references to Miss Slack, the librarian; Miss Annie Cutler, and the Misses Atkinson, Harris, Clark, and Cook.