110 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



on the death of his father in 1873 was the direction of what is 

 now one of the great museums of the world, and to which 

 during his life time he gave a million and a half of dollars and 

 devoted nearly fifty years of service. As a boy he had seen it 

 housed in a ramshackle wooden shed and then grow in his 

 father's hands to something like what it eventually became, 

 and as an old man he left it after one of his last endowments 

 practically complete as to the scheme and arrangement and 

 exhibiting, as no other museum in the world does, the geo- 

 graphical and oceanographical distribution of animal life. 

 At the time of his death, in 1910, the museum had pub- 

 lished fifty-four volumes of its Bulletin and forty volumes 

 of the larger Memoirs, for the most part at the expense 

 of Mr. Agassiz. 



In addition to all his scientific work it must be remembered 

 that Alexander Agassiz was a highly successful man of 

 business. He had been trained at the university as a mining 

 engineer, and as a young man he took over the management 

 of the Calumet and Hecla copper-mines, on the southern shore 

 of Lake Superior, which were then in a desperate state. 

 These are remarkable mines in this respect, that the metal 

 occurs not as an ore, but in the form of native copper. By 

 his engineering knowledge, his business ability and his 

 indomitable perseverance he managed to overcome great 

 difficulties and convert an enterprise that seemed doomed to 

 failure into a great financial success. He was president of 

 this very important mining company up to the time of his 

 death in 1910. 



The hardships he endured during many winter months in 

 the wilds, while seeing his mines through their early troubles, 

 brought on a severe illness (1868) from which, it is said, he 

 never completely recovered. In his convalescence the 

 liberaHty of a Boston friend enabled him to realize a long- 

 wished-for opportunity of visiting and examining the 

 collections of Echinoderms in European museums, and of 

 becoming personally acquainted with the British naturalists 



