454 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



His experience at Penikese was, however, by no means in vain, for 

 it deeply impressed him with the advisability of establishing a sum- 

 mer school for research in marine zoology, so that in 1877 he built 

 upon his place at Castle Hill, at the mouth of Newport Harbor, an 

 ideal little research laboratory which afforded excellent accommoda- 

 tions for half a dozen students at a time. For 18 years students and 

 instructors from Harvard College visited this charming spot, and 

 many are the papers which resulted from their labors there. Count 

 Pourtales, W. K. Brooks, Fewkes, and ^Vliitman were the first work- 

 ers in the station, and each j^ear about 10 of the most promising of 

 the research students in zoology at Harvard were privileged to study 

 at the Newport laboratory. Every day a stage bore them from the 

 town, 4 miles away, to the laboratory and back again at 5 o'clock in 

 the afternoon, after the daily swim in the ocean. The laboratory 

 was excellent!}^ equipped with reagents, glassware, and large tanks 

 provided with running salt or fresh water. The microscope tables 

 were set upon stone foundations to avoid vibration, and a good little 

 steam launch lay at her moorings in a near cove, ready to dredge in 

 the service of science. I treasure the memory of those youthful days 

 at Newport, when the enthusiastic spirit of our great leader was an 

 inspiration to each and every one of us, and I recall his delight over 

 the rare " finds " we occasionally discovered in the surface tow, which 

 was made every night and lay awaiting our study in the morning. 

 Gradually, however, a change came over the Newport laboratory; 

 the once pure water of the harbor became more and more polluted 

 as population and shipping increased, until finally, in 1897, students 

 were no longer invited to come to Newport, and the scientific ex- 

 istence of the laboratory ceased. An account of- the laboratory, 

 together with a plan of the building, will be found in Nature, volume 

 19, pages 317-319, 1879, and in the Centuiy Magazine for September, 

 1883, but these fail to give an idea of the attractive little vine-clad 

 building nestled clown on the slope of the shore, overlooking its little 

 cove with the beautiful bay to the northward and the ocean on the 

 south. 



Alexander Agassiz was the first to see that the southern shore of 

 New England was most favorably placed for the site of such a sta- 

 tion, for he discovered that here arctic forms are carried down dur- 

 ing the winter and early spring, whereas late in summer the south- 

 erly winds bring drifting upward from the Gulf Stream animals 

 whose true homes are in the warm waters of the tropical Atlantic, and 

 thus one meets with an extraordinary seasonal variation of marine life 

 on the southern coast of New England. 



In 1874 Alexander Agassiz was elected curator of the museum, to 

 succeed his father in this responsible position, and indeed the pros- 

 pects of the museum were at that time such as to inspire grave appre- 



