452 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



In his treatment of assistants and collaborators he displayed a most 

 commendably unselfish spirit, and indeed the only differences I ex- 

 perienced during eight years in which I served as his assistant were 

 occasioned in persuading him to permit his name to appear as the 

 senior author of publications which were actually the result of our 

 joint efforts. 



Labor at the copper mines made enormous drains upon his seem- 

 ingly inexhaustible energy, for during the early years of his connec- 

 tion with the company he worked upon an average of 14^ hours each 

 day. Yet, arduous as these duties were, between 1867 and 1874 they 

 made but little difference in the output of his scientific work, for in 

 this period he produced 19 papers, one of them being his famous 

 " Revision of the Echini." Another announces the discovery that 

 Tornaria is undoubtedly the larva of Balanoglossus, and in another 

 he proves that the peculiar pincer-like organs found upon the echini 

 are in reality only highly modified spines, and they serve to keep the 

 animal clean by actually grasping and removing detritus from the 

 surface of the creature. In another work of this period he presents a 

 paper illustrated by 202 excellent figures and giving a complete ac- 

 count of the embryology of those most diaphanous of marine ani- 

 mals, the Ctenophorse. 



Indeed, it may be said that, while his later work was far more 

 elaborate and widely known, it was not more brilliant than that of 

 this period which closed with his fortieth year, and these older papers 

 are of such fundamental importance that they are quoted in all gen- 

 eral text-books of zoology. We see, then, that these days of his early 

 manhood between 1861 and 1873 were rich in achievement in science 

 and remarkable in other respects, for it was during this period that 

 he raised himself from poverty to wealth more than sufficient to meet 

 the demands of his expensive researches in zoology. 



But the " happy old days " were soon to pass away forever from the 

 life of Alexander Agassiz, for on December 14, 1873, his great father 

 died, and to deepen his misery his wife, to whom he was devotedly 

 attached, passed away only eight days after his father's death, and his 

 own health, undermined by too strenuous labor, failed so seriously 

 that throughout the remainder of his life he suffered from an im- 

 pairment of the circulation which obliged him to seek a warm climate 

 every winter. 



Those who knew him in his happier years say that from this time 

 onward a great change was observed in him. These irreparable losses 

 came upon him at a time when youth was gone, but middle age had 

 hardly come upon him and most things of life were yet in store for 

 him. Henceforth he was to live alone with his sorrow, master always 

 of himself, simple almost to austerity in his tastes, but deprived of 

 that sympathy which only a wife could give, it is but little to be 



