COMMEMORATION ADDRESSES 395 



brings us all here, and encourages me to address you, 

 however inadequately. 



For, to go back from Radcliffe College to Agassiz 

 School is something like going back to the nursery. 

 Yet the nursery holds an important place, and 

 surely the good seed sown in Agassiz School has blos- 

 somed in Radcliffe College! 



To the seventy school-girls or more, between the 

 ages of fifteen and eighteen, who every morning came 

 running up the staircase to the third story of Mrs. 

 Agassiz's home in Quincy Street, to their cheerful, 

 well-lighted, well-warmed, and well-ventilated class- 

 rooms, the phrase "Higher Education of Women" 

 was unknown. Yet, like M. Jourdain, who had spoken 

 prose all his life without knowing it, we had the 

 Higher Education offered to us. Indeed we had the 

 Highest Education: the daily contact with superior 

 minds imbued with a desire to impart their knowl- 

 edge to us, to give us high standards, to awaken wide 

 interests. And thus we school-girls had a glimpse and 

 foretaste of the good things that were coming to 

 women all the world over, and we can especially re- 

 joice in Radcliffe's adult strength, in its organized 

 growth and power. 



In her Life of Louis Agassiz, Mrs. Agassiz gives a 

 few pages to the School. It owed its existence, she 

 states, as many another school has done, to the desire 

 of the wife, the son, the daughter, to lift a burden 

 from the head of the family. The plans, she relates, 

 were discussed in secret between the three, but, when 

 the conspirators with many misgivings unfolded their 



