204 ELIZABETH GARY AGASSIZ 



student, who might thus have immortalized himself but 

 missed a chance for distinction by failing to claim as his 

 invention the name that had no rival for fifteen years in 

 spite of more official designations. 



Mrs. Agassiz had been sought as one of the managers, 

 apart from her own personality, because of the aims in edu- 

 cation with which she had been identified in the Agassiz 

 School, one of the objectives in which had been, like that 

 of the Committee, to provide instruction for young girls 

 from members of the faculty of Harvard College. There can 

 be no doubt that it was principally because she regarded 

 this movement almost as a continuation of the aims of the 

 school that Mrs. Agassiz was ready to take part in it. " But 

 for the school," she wrote toward the end of her life to Miss 

 Cary, "the college (so far as I am concerned) would never 

 have existed." Yet in February, 1879, she did not in the 

 least foresee the proportions in her life that this new under- 

 taking was to assume. The mere fact that in her diary she 

 made no record of her invitation to serve on the Committee 

 is an indication of how entirely informal the arrangement 

 was and how far from important the matter seemed to her. 

 At the time of the first meetings she was occupied with the 

 revision of her First Lesson in Natural History, of which 

 a second edition was about to be issued, and her daily en- 

 tries chronicle the stages of her work on this little book, but 

 pass by in silence or barely mention many of the meetings 

 which Mr. Oilman's Notes show that she attended. In fact, 

 Mrs. Agassiz later admitted that only a conversation with 

 President Eliot led her to realize that by putting her signa- 

 ture to the first circular she had brought definite responsi- 

 bilities upon herself in regard to the care of the prospective 



