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THURSDAY, JANUARY 29,. 1914. 
MILLIONAIRE AND NATURALIST. 
Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz. 
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“windows of the state dining hall! 
With a Sketch of his Life and Work. Edited 
by G. R. Agassiz. Pp. xi+454+>plates. 
(London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1913.) 
Price 14s: net: 
HIS is an unusually interesting and well- 
conceived biography, for it gives us a vivid 
and often a pathetic picture of a truly remarkable 
man, and a thoroughly readable account of his 
great scientific enterprises as they followed, one 
growing from another, during his marvellously 
active and productive life. Alexander Agassiz 
was as astonishing for his energy and the magni- 
ficent scale of his scientific investigations as he 
was fascinating and lovable in personal inter- 
course. It was my good fortune to know him 
Whenever he was in London we dined to- 
gether; he was my guest at Oxford when I was 
professor there, and we spent some days together 
in Paris about ten years ago, when he had settled 
in his favourite hotel—the Athenée—to do a spell 
of literary work. Few men, if any, of his day 
gave such an impression of power and intellectual 
capacity combined with so much light-heartedness 
and charm of manner. 
Alexander was the only son of the great natural- 
ist Louis Agassiz, who came from a long line of 
Swiss Protestant ministers in the Canton de Vaud. 
He was born at Neuchatel in 1835, when that place 
was under the dominion of Prussia. As a boy 
he was, we are told, “rather quiet, with the be- 
witching smile so characteristic of the man,” and 
at ten years of age actively sympathised with the 
Swiss or anti-Prussian party. He incurred the 
displeasure of the retired Prussian general who 
was governor of the town by not saluting him 
politely. That functionary complained to Louis 
Agassiz of his son’s conduct, who accordingly 
thrashed Alexander. The latter revenged himself 
by publicly refusing to receive his school prizes 
at the hands of the governor, and turning his 
back with scorn on the representative of the king. 
Subsequently he organised a band of confederates 
of his own age, stormed the castle on the night 
of a large dinner party, and smashed all the 
In after years 
Alexander remarked that it was perhaps fortunate 
he emigrated to the United States at an early age, 
as, with his views, he would surely in due time 
have been hanged or shot. 
Louis Agassiz went to the United States in 1846, 
leaving his family (his wife, son, and two 
daughters) to follow. In 1849 he became settled 
NO. 2309, VOL. 92] 
as Professor of Natural History at Harvard, and 
sent for his son, whose mother had died in the 
previous year. Alexander soon imbibed the 
atmosphere of freedom of his adopted country, and 
records that “he could scarcely realise that it ever 
had been possible for a small boy to be nagged 
and punished for political opinions.” A year after 
Alexander’s arrival in Cambridge, Mass., his 
father brought home his second wife, a rare and 
devoted woman, who was to Alexander (as he tells 
us), in the subsequent trials and griefs, joys, and 
triumphs of life, ‘his mother, sister, companion, 
and friend all in one.” She died in 1907, only 
three years before her stepson, having long sur- 
vived his young wife, who died in 1873, and his 
father, who died at the same time. Alexander 
writes of his step-mother :— 
“The like of her we shall not see again. From 
the time that I first saw her, and I only a small 
boy of thirteen, there never was a word of dis- 
agreement. She belonged to me and I to her; 
it could not have been otherwise.” 
I have just turned over the pages of the book 
which they produced together in 1865—‘‘ Seaside 
Studies in Natural History ’’—the admirable draw- 
ings and observations (many of them new and of 
great importance) on Meduse, Polyps, and 
Echinoderms and their young stages, by Alex- 
ander, whilst the text is written by his “mother,” 
for so he always called her. 
The young Agassiz, after a couple of years at 
school in Cambridge, entered at Harvard in the 
autumn of 1851, at the age of fifteen. His friends 
tell us that he already possessed an unusual power 
of concentration and a gift of accomplishing what 
he intended to do. He was slight but remarkably 
powerful and active. He pulled in the University 
crew and retained his interest in rowing all through 
his life. After four years ‘“‘in college” (corre- 
sponding, apparently, to the old bachelor-of-arts 
course of Oxford and Cambridge a hundred years 
earlier), Agassiz entered the engineering depart- 
ment of the Lawrence Scientific School, and gradu- 
ated in 1857, at the age of twenty-two, and then 
studied chemistry. In 1859 he obtained the posi- 
tion of aid on the United States Coast Survey, 
but gave it up and returned to his father’s museum 
in Harvard on a salary of 3oo0l. a year. On this 
income he married Miss Anna Russell, the sister 
of the wife of his classmate, Theodore Lyman, 
and settled down to a life of the most rigid 
economy, but surrounded by friends and occupied 
with interesting work. He now published his 
classical works on the embryology of Echinoderms 
and on North American Acalephe, illustrated by 
360 figures drawn by his own hand. He had a 
laborious duty in the charge of the correspondence 
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