1912] Zoology in America 63 



with the microscope, the wonderful phenomena of marine life. 

 Agassiz brought with him to this country the interest in the 

 sea and its organisms. This he spread, and in the last years 

 of his life brought to a focus in the establishment of his famous 

 summer school on the island of Penikese, the first of the marine 

 laboratories now to be found scattered along our Atlantic and 

 Pacific coasts. The Penikese laboratory exerted an immense 

 influence, but served its purpose and ceased to be, unlike that 

 other magnificent institution founded by Agassiz and developed 

 by his great son, the "Museum of Comparative Zoology at Har- 

 vard College." 



In the midst of Agassiz's career in this country came the 

 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), and the 

 speedy adoption by the great bulk of the thinking world of the 

 theory of evolution. The ferment of the evolution idea shook 

 America as it did other countries. Similarities such as Agassiz 

 had been interpreting in poetic, transcendental fashion, became 

 matters of more practical concern. The past history of the 

 living world was opened to investigation, and with all the enthu- 

 siasm of explorers, ardent spirits on many sides began with 

 fresh energy to dig for fossils, to trace the changes of form 

 undergone by the egg in its course of development, to look for 

 transitional types filling up the gaps between groups, and to 

 study in detail the tissues and organs and plan of body of all 

 animals, low and high, that could tell us anything of general 

 interest about the kinship of groups. It takes an idea to make 

 men work, and evolution was the new idea, more stimulating, 

 more strengthening, as results came in, to the searcher than any 

 of its predecessors. The ancestral history or phylogeny of each 

 group was constructed and reconstructed, and reconstructed 

 again, as new data became available. The data were in kind 

 not different from the discoveries of fundamental similarities 

 of structure, familiar to biologists in the pre-evolutionary epoch, 

 but now they were discovered in places where the earlier nat- 

 uralists had not looked for them, and even between the great 

 groups or phyla sharp lines were wiped out. Above all the 

 volume of discovery streaming in soon became far greater than 



