1887] Indiana Academy of Sciences 



institutions, although "conservative Cornell" still 

 confers several different baccalaureate titles. With 

 passing years I have seen no reason to change 

 materially the views thus early formulated by me, 

 though I recognize that the abolition of the Bachelor's 

 degree, which represents merely a start in general 

 culture, is much farther off than I had anticipated. 

 Baccalaureate degrees, moreover, have one real 

 value, that of identifying and binding together a 

 body of college alumni. 



In the spring of 1887, also, the Indiana Academy 

 of Sciences was organized, with me as first president, 

 its nucleus being, as I have said, the enthusiastic 

 local Natural History Society of Brookville. For Dispersion 

 my formal address at the academy's first meeting 

 I chose "The Dispersion of Fresh-water Fishes," 

 setting forth all that was then known of the various 

 ways in which fishes migrate from one water basin 

 to another. 



During the summer I spent some weeks in the 

 Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, working 

 over all the marine fishes collected by Agassiz in 

 Brazil, and describing the various species new to 

 science. The thousands of river fishes in the same 

 collection I did not touch, as the amount of material 

 was far too large. Some of it was later studied by 

 Steindachner of Vienna, one of Agassiz's early assist- 

 ants; the rest by Eigenmann, whose explorations 

 of South American rivers have been more extensive 

 than those of all other naturalists combined. 



On August 10 of this year I was married, in Marriage 

 Worcester, Massachusetts, to Miss Jessie Knight, * 

 a Cornell student with whom I had become ac- 



