100 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
utive ability fitted him in an eminent degree to be the leader of 
scientific expeditions. Each exploring trip was planned to a 
day even to its minute details, every course charted, distances 
measured and every station decided upon, before he left his desk 
in the Harvard Museum, so that all of its achievements were 
actually prearranged. . .. It is due chiefly to his forethought 
that in more than 100,000 miles of wandering over tropical seas 
he never met with a serious accident... . Among scientific 
men be became the greatest patron of zodlogy our country has 
known. In 1910, at the time of his death, the fifty-fourth volume 
of the Bulletins, and the fortieth volume of the Memoirs of the 
Museum of Comparative Zodlogy were appearing. These pub- 
lications had been started in 1863 and 1864, and in the number of 
important and beautifully illustrated papers they contain they 
have been excelled by only a few of the most active scientific 
societies of the world; yet the expense of producing them has 
largely been borne by one man—Alexander Agassiz.” *’ He 
bequeathed the sum of $50,000 “for the general use of the 
Academy.” **° 
The International Union for Codperation in Solar Research 
in which the Academy is represented held its fourth conference 
at the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory from August 31 to 
September 2, 1910. At this meeting, which was attended by 37 
delegates from foreign countries and 47 from the United States, 
the scope of the Union was extended to include all branches of 
astrophysics. “ The resolutions adopted called for the continua- 
tion of the series of daily photographs of the calcium flocculi 
with spectroheliographs used by cooperating observatories in 
various parts of the world; the addition of a series of daily pho- 
tographs of the hydrogen flocculi; the inclusion in the list of 
cooperating institutions of the observatories at Tacubaya, 
Mexico, and Madrid, Spain; the adoption of definite inter- 
national standards of wave-lengths of the second order, based 
on interferometer determinations made at three laboratories; 
** Pop. Sci. Monthly, November, 1910, pp. 425, 430. 
*“ This sum was paid into the treasury on February 1, rgrr. 
