THE AGASSIZ SCHOOL 57 



a gold mine in Brazil and carry it home and plant it in the 

 Museum grounds and dig up a great lump as big as my 

 head whenever anything is wanted there." That her inter- 

 est was not purely sentimental, but was highly intelligent 

 as well is shown by the letter given below on page 93, 

 and also by the following quotation from an article in 

 the Boston Evening Transcript for April 23, 1907, by her 

 old friend Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson: 



Nature had made [Agassiz] a delightful lecturer and 

 art had added a skilful adaptation to his audience 

 which secured an annual appropriation for his Mu- 

 seum for years after the Massachusetts Legislature 

 had stopped all similar appropriations, except this. 

 I once watched him in this process of persuasion when 

 I went in with a large committee of that honorable 

 body to observe his ways. Asked to address them he 

 would begin in the simplest manner and shoot on and 

 on, charming all with his heartiness; and when after a 

 moment's pause some veteran country member would 

 stumble in with the shy question, "This is most in- 

 teresting, but may we not interrupt the professor to 

 give us from a practical view some illustration of the 

 actual value of all this that we may carry to the 

 Legislature?" . . . Agassiz would eagerly say, "O, I 

 thank the gentleman for his suggestion; that is just 

 what I was coming to. I am glad to inform you that 

 we have just in hand a new experiment which would 

 alone be a sufficient vindication of this whole appro- 

 priation. . . ." This being explained with zest, they 

 would break up the meeting and look about the Mu- 



