16 MARINE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY. 



two reserved for laboratory purposes and two undivided parcels. 

 In accordance with a vote of the Executive Committee, it was 

 decided to withdraw the remainder from sale until the summer 

 of 1924 pending the determination of a new policy, which should 

 ensure the interest of the Laboratory in its perpetual control of 

 at least a portion of the tract. 



5. Agassiz Memorial. In accordance with plans announced 

 last year exercises were held at the Marine Biological Lab- 

 oratory on August 13 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary 

 of the founding of the Anderson School of Natural History on 

 the Island of Penikese in 1873 by Louis Agassiz. This was the 

 last considerable event of his life for he died in December of the 

 same year, sixty-six years of age. The Penikese School was con- 

 tinued in the summer of 1874 by his son, Alexander Agassiz, and 

 members of Louis Agassiz' staff. The Laboratory existed only 

 two years; it was under the direction of the master naturalist 

 only one year, yet Marcou, Agassiz' biographer, calls the founding 

 of the Penikese Laboratory the most extraordinary episode in 

 Agassiz' life; and David Starr Jordan, one of Agassiz' associates 

 in 1873, writes in his autobiography "The Days of a Man." 

 "While Penikese is deserted, the impulse which came from 

 Agassiz' work there still lives and is deeply felt in every field of 

 American Science. For with all due appreciation of the rich 

 streams which in later years have flowed from many quarters, it 

 is still true that the school with most extended influence on 

 scientific teaching in America was held in an old barn on a little 

 off-shore island. It lasted only a few months, and it had virtually 

 but one teacher. When he died it vanished." 



This event was accordingly celebrated by a largely attended 

 meeting, at which a bronze tablet was presented n duplicate, 

 the original to be set in a boulder on the hill on Penikese over- 

 looking the site of the former Laboratory and the sea beyond, 

 the replica to be set in an appropriate place in the Woods Hole 

 Laboratory. For permission to set the Penikese tablet we are 

 indebted to the Senate and House of Representatives of the 

 State of Massachusetts which passed an enabling bill, and to 

 Governor Cox who interested himself in its passage and signed 

 it. The tablet at Woods Hole will recall to successive genera- 

 tions of naturalists young and old the services of the Great 



