PREFACE 



Any one who attempts to present a faithful impression 

 of Alexander Agassiz's life is confronted with unusual 

 difficulties, for his versatile and restless energy covered 

 a very extraordinarily wide field, and his personality was 

 so large that we are hampered in our view of him by 

 our own limitations. The morphologist considers his 

 earlier work the most important ; the geologist, that his 

 reputation rests chiefly on his extensive investigations 

 of coral reefs ; the zoologist remembers his vast collec- 

 tions of marine life gathered in a dozen extended voy- 

 ages widely scattered over the surface of the globe ; and 

 to still others he appears as the creator of a vast museum 

 and one of the greatest benefactors of the oldest univer- 

 sity in America ; while those who delve among ancient 

 civilizations and primitive races might well be surprised 

 at the extent of his poaching in their preserves, a mere 

 detour in his many wanderings in the pursuit of science 

 or search of health. In the world of affairs he was 

 known as an extremely capable and successful mining 

 man, who was said to employ his leisure moments in 

 some sort of scientific study. 



When I first began to collect material for a life of 

 my father, I hoped that it would be possible to tell it 

 in his own words. But grave objections to such a plan 

 soon appeared ; one of the foremost being the mysteri- 

 ous disappearance of most of his later correspondence 

 with his stepmother. It is, moreover, a much more dif- 



