32 ELIZABETH GARY AGASSIZ 



Eventually Agassiz established himself in East Boston, 

 and in 1848 after the canton of Neuchatel ceased to be 

 a dependency of the Prussian kingdom and he had been 

 honorably discharged from the service of the King of 

 Prussia, he accepted the chair of Natural History at the 

 Lawrence Scientific School, then a newly organized de- 

 partment of Harvard University. The spring of that year, 

 accordingly, found him established in Cambridge in a small 

 house on Oxford Street. But the favorable prospects that 

 were opening before him were soon shadow^ed by the death 

 of his wife, and his sense of loss was intensified by the sepa- 

 ration from his children, whom he considered too young 

 to bring to America. A sketch of his life at this time has 

 been given in his biography by Mrs. Agassiz, which is 

 quoted here as her own description of the community in 

 which she was soon to take her place. 



The college was then on a smaller scale than now, 

 but upon its list of professors were names which would 

 have given distinction to any university. In letters, 

 there were Longfellow and Lowell, and Felton, the 

 genial Greek scholar of whom Longfellow himself 

 wrote, "In Attica thy birthplace should have been." 

 In science, there were Peirce, the mathematician, and 

 Dr. Asa Gray, then just installed at the Botanical 

 Garden, and Jeffries Wyman, the comparative anato- 

 mist, appointed at about the same time with Agassiz 

 himself. . . . 



In connection with these names, those of Prescott, 

 Ticknor, Motley, and Holmes also arise most natur- 

 ally, for the literary men and scholars of Cambridge 

 and Boston were closely united; and if Emerson, in his 



