LOUIS AGASSIZ 103 



movements, and former extension of the glaciers in Switzer- 

 land. 



In 1846 he went to America, leaving his son Alexander at 

 school in Switzerland, and his wife and two young daughters 

 with her brother, who was then a professor at Karlsruhe. He 

 gave a course of Lowell lectures at Boston, and became at once 

 a tremendous success as a popular expositor of all the natural 

 history sciences and a great influence, not merely in the 

 university circle at Harvard and amongst the intellectuals of 

 Boston, but even amongst the hard-headed New England 

 business men. He was extraordinarily enthusiastic and 

 energetic, not merely in giving courses of lectures at various 

 centres in the Eastern States, but also in making important 

 scientific investigations wherever he went, beginning with 

 the study of successive upheavals of the coast near Boston, 

 the geographical distribution of marine animals and their 

 relation to the Tertiary fossils, and the investigation of many 

 groups of animals both on land and sea. 



From 1847 onwards the hospitality of the U.S. Coast 

 Survey vessels seems to have been constantly open to him, 

 and thus his influence on oceanography began. Under no 

 other Government probably could he have had opportunities 

 so valuable to a naturalist, and probably no Government ever 

 got a better return for friendly co-operation with men of 

 science. Louis Agassiz had intended merely to pay a visit 

 to the States, give his Lowell lectures, and then return to 

 Switzerland, but one engagement at Boston led to another, to 

 delay his return. The following year, 1848, he was offered a 

 newly established Chair of Natural History at Harvard, at a 

 salary of £300, and in that post he remained to the end of his 

 days. He began to accumulate what is now the celebrated 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology, housed at first in an old 

 wooden shanty set on piles on the bank of the Charles river, 

 and it was not until ten or twelve years later that the 

 university commenced to build for him the present great 

 University Museum at Cambridge, Massachusetts, which 



