THE MUSEUM HIS HEADQUARTERS 45 



father fitted tables, shelves, and the necessary glassware 

 for a marine laboratory ; and here they set up their 

 microscopes. In a bight near by, Alexander kept a dory 

 which he used for collecting specimens. One of his step- 

 cousins, then a small boy, used in after years to tell how 

 he crept out to watch Agassiz skillfully launch his heavy 

 boat through the surf and admire the ease with which, 

 without apparent effort, he ran it up the steep beach. 



The material for his studies was furnished by such 

 animals as he could pick up among the rocks at low tide 

 or catch with a scoop net from his dory, varied by an 

 occasional find brought in by some friendly fisherman. 



Among his best known publications of this period 

 was a series of papers on the embryology of our com- 

 mon sea-urchins and starfishes (Echinoderms) which 

 are found everywhere along our New England coast 

 hidden in crevices of the rocks or among the seaweed. 

 Until Johannes Muller discovered where to find the 

 young of these animals, who would have thought of 

 looking for them among the minute transparent and 

 phosphorescent organisms that float near the surface of 

 the ocean, and transform the wake of one's boat on a 

 still dark summer night into a path of fire, and turn 

 each dip of the oar blade into a swirl of molten gold? 



Derbes and Krohn had studied the development of 

 eggs taken from adult animals and artificially fertilized. 1 

 Muller had himself studied the later forms of the larvae 

 when they take on strange shapes with queer arm-like 

 appendages, utterly unlike the starfishes and sea-urchins 

 which they finally become. It remained for Agassiz to 

 make a complete study of the embryology of these ani- 



1 This was a true fertilization, and should not be confused with recent 

 experiments in stimulating various eggs by means of different salts. 



