1 I ARRIVING IN WOODS HOLE /A 11 



On the Isle of Penikese, 

 Ringed about by sapphire seas, 

 Fanned by breezes salt and cool, 

 Stood the Master with his school. . . . 

 Said the Master to the youth: 

 We have come in search of truth, 

 Trying with uncertain key 

 Door by door of mystery; 

 We are reaching, through His laws, 

 To the garment-hem of Cause . . .' 



After the dedication the group enjoyed a feast. Then the reporters left the 

 island to file their enthusiastic stories praising this great moment in Amer- 

 ican education and in American science. Only then, as one student put it, did 

 the small group of remaining teachers-turned-students realize that they 

 were settied on a barren island only two-thirds of a mile long and one-third 

 of a mile wide. Without distractions, science would occupy the summer. 



That summer's experience on that tiny island made a major difference 

 to American science. Among those inspired by the island school was Alpheus 

 Hyatt, destined to run his own teachers' school for the Boston Society of 

 Natural History and to provide the motivating force for the founding of the 

 MBL. There was also David Starr Jordan, who became tiie first president of 

 Stanford University and sought to build it into a western scientific empire. 

 Also among the students was Charles Otis Whitman, who taught at Boston's 

 English High School. During this summer of 1873, and the next when he 

 returned to Penikese as an advanced student under Agassiz's son Alexander 

 (who took over the school for one year after Louis suddenly died), Whitman 

 decided to become a professional biologist. That meant he would have to go 

 to Europe to pursue a doctoral degree, with all the resulting difficulties for 

 one from a 'sober and pious" but definitely not wealthy family from Maine. 

 But he had made up his mind, and Whitman was a stubborn and dedicated 

 man. He went to Germany in 1875, where he received his Ph.D. for work on 

 the embryology of leeches. After a two-year stay in Japan, he returned to the 

 United States. He directed the Allis Lake Laboratory in Milwaukee, chaired 

 the department at Clark University, and made his way to Woods Hole, full of 

 ideas and energy, and ready to head the Marine Biological Laboratory when 

 it began in 1888. 



Summers in Woods Hoie, 



Mt. Holyoke professor and former Penikese participant Cornelia Clapp 

 arrived in the very first year of the MBL, in 1888, and found a quiet, tiny 

 village. Ferry service from Woods Hole to Martha's Vineyard had begun in 

 1749, and hotels and summer estates had begun to appear by 1872, but only 



