INTRODUCTION I I 



Augustus Peabody. VVyman was a shy, retiring man of frailest health 

 for years. But while he was writing brilliantly and with extraor- 

 dinary patience and accuracy on many topics he was aiding in 

 bringing together the collection which formed the Peabody Museum 

 of Archaeology and Ethnology. When the endowment for the be- 

 ginning of this institution came in 1866 he became curator of the 

 Museum, and held the position until his death in 1874, less than a 

 year after the death of Agassiz. 



F. W. Putnam, another of Agassiz's students, took charge of the 

 Peabody Museum the year after Wyman's death and continued as 

 Peabody Professor and Curator until 191 3, when he became Emeri- 

 tus; he died two years later. Putnam got a passion for accumulating 

 material straight from Agassiz. He realized that primitive man was 

 disappearing all over the world, and where he was not disappearing 

 he was ceasing to make and to do the things which his forefathers had 

 done. Putnam was by no means a collector alone. His students 

 went far and wide over the country to become curators of new mu- 

 seums and to teach archaeology from coast to coast. His students in 

 the Peabody Museum today continue to enlarge its collections and to 

 train teachers and investigators, and this department holds an almost 

 unique record among all the departments of the University for the 

 extraordinary proportion of anthropological positions held through- 

 out the country by Harvard men. The Peabody publications have 

 gone far and wide describing the discoveries made in the Mu- 

 seum and in the field by men from this section of the University 

 Museum. 



The Mineralogical and Geological Museums, also sections of the 

 University Museum, grew under J. P. Cooke and later with the aid 

 from Wolff, Sayles, Holden and other friends of the department. 

 N. S. Shaler, who died in 1906, continued to the last to fill 

 Sanders Theatre with a throng of young men who came to hear 

 him first out of curiosity, and who remained to be enthralled with the 

 manner in which he depicted the great events of geological history. 



It is not my desire here to discuss the work of living men, nor am I 

 qualified to do so, and as Geology at Harvard is at the peak of its 

 most effective period of both teaching and research at the present 

 time there seems to be little more to do than to state this fact and to 

 rejoice to be able so to do. 



