ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 109 



caused him to refuse what must have been in some ways a 

 very tempting offer. There is no doubt that he gave much 

 scientific service in hydrographic work for the U.S. Coast 

 Survey, in charting the seas of both the Atlantic and Pacific 

 shores of his adopted land. 



Although trained as an engineer, there is no doubt that 

 even in his younger days, when working at his profession, his 

 heart was really in marine biology, and he made notable 

 contributions to embryology and morphology quite apart 

 from his constant museum work at Harvard and his later 

 oceanographic expeditions. His memoirs on the North 

 American Acalephce, on the Embryology of the Star-Fish and 

 his Revision of the Echini established his position as a first- 

 rate zoologist. He discovered the relation of the ' ' Tornaria " 

 larva to the chordate Balanoglossus, the larval stages of 

 various Annelids, the pelagic young of certain fishes, the fact 

 that the pincer-like pedicellarise of Echinids are modified 

 spines, and many new deep-sea animals, all before his 

 fortieth year. 



Upon the death of his father in 1873 he undertook the 

 direction of the marine biological laboratory which had just 

 been established on Penikese Island, but after running it, 

 with the valued assistance of Packard and Putnam, for one 

 succeeding year, he found that the strain was more than his 

 health could stand, and, consequently, as that isolated island 

 was in many ways inconvenient for the purpose, he was led to 

 abandon that first American marine station and erect a 

 private laboratory beside his house at Castle Hill, near 

 Newport, Rhode Island, which, for the next quarter of a 

 century, was an active centre for a small body of the leading 

 younger biologists of America. The Newport laboratory 

 was finally closed to students in 1898, when its place was 

 taken by the now celebrated marine laboratory and the Fish 

 Commission Hatchery at Woods Hole, near the junction of 

 Buzzard's Bay and Vineyard Sound. 



Another piece of work which Alexander Agassiz took over 



