Agassiz, was a life-long advocate of higher education for both sexes. Many 

 years before the "Annex" was ever dreamed of, he formed a class in geom- 

 etry for girls in Cambridge, of which my own elder sister was a member ; and 

 he more than once received young women as pupils in the higher mathematics. 

 He was one of the first and warmest friends of school suffrage for women, 

 attending some of the first and some of the latest meetings on that subject, 

 down to the time of his last illness ; and on one of these occasions, last April 

 or thereabouts, at a meeting held in Boston, he made an appeal to women for 

 the discharge of their duty under the law, an appeal so solemn and impress- 

 ive as to hold the audience spell-bound. There was always something 

 peculiarly serious in his manner and thrilling in his voice, when he was 

 deeply moved ; and I should not think that any person who heard him at 

 that particular time could ever forget it. 



Professor Peirce was one of the last links between the old and new Har- 

 vard College. He recalled a period when the numerical smallness of the 

 corps of professors was balanced by remarkable individual instances of 

 strength and talent ; so that, while the total weight of influence exerted over 

 pupils may have been less than now, the strength of individual impression was 

 perhaps greater. It is the fashion to speak of Professor Peirce as a man of 

 great mathematical genius, but unfitted for a teacher ; as one whose books 

 were obscure, and whose personal instructions difficult an 1 discouraging. 

 But, speaking as one of his earlier pupils, I can say that his was on the 

 whole the most stimulating intellectual influence I ever encountered ; that no 

 text-books bring back such associations of mental excitement as his Geom- 

 etry and Algebra and Trigonometry ; I never open them without'wishing that 

 I could resume that particular study with him as a teacher ; and this, after 

 all, must be the test of influence. 



Perhaps there was something particularly favorable in the circumstances 

 under which I first knew him. My class in Harvard College was the first in 

 which was tried a short-lived experiment toward what is now called the Elec- 

 tive System. By the plan then attempted, mathematics ceased to be a pre- 

 scribed s-tudy after the sophomore year ; and only those continued it who 

 voluntarily chose that elective. This system, now familiar, was then a nov- 

 elty ; and it was probably a real pleasure for a man of genius like Peirce to 

 have in his hands only a few who were willing to be taught, instead of a large 

 number of unwilling pupils to be dragged along. In the first glow, he proba- 

 bly overrated both the zeal and the capacity of his special students ; but v he 

 certainly threw himself with the greatest zest into the work of instruction. 



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