LOUIS AGASSIZ 161 



ing musical critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner the 

 academic champion of freedom, Andrew, ' the great war governor ' 

 of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe, the philanthropist, William Hunt, 

 the painter, with others not unworthy of such company." 



Among the many experiences of Agassiz was being taken for a 

 harmless lunatic by some country men when on a trip through 

 New Hampshire. With some friends he collected insects and 

 pinned them to his hat and coat. Some one asked the driver of 

 the coach who the men were who acted so strangely, and he re- 

 plied, " Their keeper says they are naturals, and I should say 

 they was." The trip of Agassiz to Brazil was one of his great 

 explorations, which lack of space will not permit reviewing. He 

 followed this in 1869 with a cruise on the Hassler to the coast of 

 Cuba, and during all these years his days, hours and moments 

 were filled with labors of the most exhaustive kind. In 1871, he 

 made a trip around the Horn to San Francisco in the Bibb, and in 

 1872 we find him again working upon the plan for a great marine 

 laboratory and school which finally took shape, due to the gift of 

 John Anderson of New York, who gave the island of Penikese for 

 the purpose and the sum of fifty thousand dollars for equipment. 

 Many of the leading naturalists of to-day were students of Agassiz 

 here, and to Dr. David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford 

 University, the writer is indebted to the following memories of 

 days with the greatest teacher of science the world has ever pro- 

 duced: 



"Penikese is a little island containing about sixty acres of very 

 rocky ground, a pile of stones, with intervals of soil. It is the last 

 and least of the Elizabeth Islands, lying to the south of Buzzards 

 Bay, on the south coast of Massachusetts. The whole cluster was 

 once a great terminal moraine of rocks and rubbish of all sorts, 

 brought down from the mainland by some ancient glacier, and 

 by it dropped off into the ocean off the heel of Cape Cod. The 

 sea has broken up the moraine into eight little islands by wearing 

 tide channels between hill and hill. The names of these islands 

 are recorded in the jingle which the children of that region learn 

 before they go to school: 



