440 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



you can thiuk of on board for comfort, servants without 

 end, an excellent stewardess, a capital head steward who is 

 indefatigable, a chef whose cooking is simply first-class. 

 The Captain, officers, and men are all old hands on board, 

 most of them have been on board the Virginia since she 

 was built, and take the greatest possible interest in all 

 that is going on. I am greatly disappointed at the 

 poverty of the towing. I expected full nets in all the 

 passages, instead of which I find nothing or almost 

 nothing. I cannot explain it as yet, but hope on the way 

 home to get some clue to such a queer state of things. 

 The assistants and machinery are all working well. 



About this time a number of events combined to sap 

 the vigor of Agassiz's old age. Calumet had recently 

 acquired control of a number of neighboring mines. A 

 small coterie of the minority stockholders of an adjacent 

 property, with whom there had been a feud since the 

 early days of Calumet, attempted by every trick known 

 to the law to exclude the majority from the management. 

 Agassiz was ultimately victorious, but the attack was so 

 viciously ill-natured and so gratuitously insulting that 

 it exasperated, distressed, and depressed him to an ex- 

 tent that would have been scarcely possible had he pos- 

 sessed the buoyancy of a younger man. 



When Mr. Schuyler was killed in a distressing rail- 

 way accident in the south, Agassiz was so broken by the 

 shock that he felt unequal to going to the funeral, and 

 sent one of his sons to represent him. He and Mr. 

 Philip Schuyler had been the warmest of friends for 

 upwards of fifty years. It was a very unusual and touch- 

 ing friendship ; the admiration of the genial man of the 

 world for the learned man of science was only equaled 



