WALCOTT. — ALEXANDER AGASSIZ. 33 



place there for mere wealth, riches were prized only where their 

 possession had contributed to the improvement or happiness of man- 

 kind, and the man without a definite occupation in life was practically 

 unknown. It was a very simple life according to the standards of the 

 present day but it yielded results which our larger material resources 

 have not proportionately multiplied. 



After a year's absence upon the Pacific coast, he returned to Cam- 

 bridge in accordance with his father's earnest wishes and definitely 

 entered upon the work of the Museum. His marriage in 1860 to Miss 

 Anna Russell, sister of the wife of Theodore Lyman, his classmate and 

 associate at the Museum, made this place also his home. His methodi- 

 cal habits and financial prudence were of great value to his father in 

 the administration of the business of the establishment and he early 

 became indispensable there. The visitor to the modest quarters of 

 the INIuseum of those days would probably have failed to discover 

 in the quiet assistant intent only on the work of the laboratories and 

 of the ]\Iuseum, the power which was destined in a few years to place 

 these collections in halls commensurate with their value and that by 

 resources won by himself in the fierce struggle for the wealth buried 

 in the depths of the earth. 



In 1859 was published his first scientific paper which was read 

 before the Natural History Society of Boston, upon the mechanism 

 of the flight of Lepidoptera — a subject hardly to be expected from 

 one who was subsequently to gain his great honors in very different 

 departments of zoology. Before the age of thirty he had published 

 more than twenty (20) papers upon scientific subjects, all of which 

 displayed originality and covered a variety of topics. He published 

 in 1865 with his stepmother, Mrs. L. Agassiz, a book of popular charac- 

 ter under the title " Seaside Studies in Natural History." He became 

 much interested in 1867 in the dredging operations of his friend Louis 

 F. de Pourtales, who on the Coast Survey Steamer "Corwin" had 

 successfully brought up material from the then unusual depth of 850 

 fathoms along the course of the Gulf Stream between the Florida 

 coast and the Bahamas. He assisted in the arrangement and descrip- 

 tion of the collections. He thus early became interested in the study 

 of the ocean bottom — the problems of which were to occupy so 

 prominent a place in all his work for the rest of his life. The influence 

 of this favorite pupil of his father and his own life long friend is 

 acknowledged in the appreciative notices which were presented to the 

 American Academy and to the National Academy after the death of 

 Pourtales. 



