100 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



utive ability fitted him in an eminent degree to be the leader of 

 scientific expeditions. Each exploring trip was planned to a 

 day even to its minute details, every course charted, distances 

 measured and every station decided upon, before he left his desk 

 in the Harvard Museum, so that all of its achievements were 

 actually prearranged. ... It is due chiefly to his forethought 

 that in more than 100,000 miles of wandering over tropical seas 

 he never met with a serious accident. . . . Among scientific 

 men be became the greatest patron of zoology our country has 

 known. In 1910, at the time of his death, the fifty-fourth volume 

 of the Bulletins, and the fortieth volume of the Memoirs of the 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology were appearing. These pub- 

 lications had been started in 1863 and 1864, and in the number of 

 important and beautifully illustrated papers they contain they 

 have been excelled by only a few of the most active scientific 

 societies of the world; yet the expense of producing them has 

 largely been borne by one man Alexander Agassiz." 107 He 

 bequeathed the sum of $50,000 " for the general use of the 

 Academy." 108 



The International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research 

 in which the Academy is represented held its fourth conference 

 at the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory from August 31 to 

 September 2, 1910. At this meeting, which was attended by 37 

 delegates from foreign countries and 47 from the United States, 

 the scope of the Union was extended to include all branches of 

 astrophysics. " The resolutions adopted called for the continua- 

 tion of the series of daily photographs of the calcium flocculi 

 with spectroheliographs used by cooperating observatories in 

 various parts of the world; the addition of a series of daily pho- 

 tographs of the hydrogen flocculi; the inclusion in the list of 

 cooperating institutions of the observatories at Tacubaya, 

 Mexico, and Madrid, Spain; the adoption of definite inter- 

 national standards of wave-lengths of the second order, based 

 on interferometer determinations made at three laboratories; 



107 Pop. Sci. Monthly, November, 1910, pp. 425, 430. 



108 This sum was paid into the treasury on February i, 1911. 



