56 ELIZABETH GARY AGASSIZ 



country at once, and I should have been living in 

 Paris to receive you when you came out this spring. 

 The letter was an official appointment to a professor- 

 ship in the Jardin des Plantes. It seems strange that 

 Agassiz should be in a position to decline a thing 

 which when he was a young man he looked upon as 

 the very brightest summit of his most ambitious 

 dreams of success; for there are no higher scientific 

 positions in Europe than those of the professors at the 

 Jardin des Plantes. Even now I think it cost him 

 something to resign it, but he can do unquestionably 

 more for science here than there and his domestic 

 relations here are so delightful that he does not hesi- 

 tate. It would give him a house in the Jardin, the 

 command of the best museums in Europe, for all care 

 and expense assistants and appointments of all kinds 

 provided, and a salary much better for Paris than 

 that he has here, — about $2000.00, I believe, and 

 the only work exacted is twenty lectures a year. It 

 has a very tempting side, but he intends to refuse it 

 at once, so don't be frightened. 



In the following year partly as a result of Agassiz's tacit 

 implication by his refusal to leave Cambridge for Paris 

 that America was the chosen field of his labors, the Mu- 

 seum of Comparative Zoology (better known as the Agas- 

 siz Museum) was established in Cambridge. The organiza- 

 tion and development of this Museum became one of the 

 most absorbing works of his life and of his son's, and 

 consequently occupied an engrossing place in that of Mrs. 

 Agassiz. " I wish," she wrote once from Brazil, " I could find 



