602 
NATURE 
[JANUARY 29, 1914 
and exchanges of the great museum which his 
father was gradually building up by the aid of 
grants from the State and handsome private sub- 
scriptions in procuring which he was irresistible. 
Alexander’s filial devotion was intense, and he 
willingly gave himself to the furtherance of his 
father’s great plan. 
Now, in 1867, came the great opportunity of 
his life. The story is given in full and interesting 
detail_in the volume of ‘Letters and Recollec- 
tions.” Briefly it is this, and, as his son observes, 
it reads more like a page of “Monte Cristo” than 
a forgotten leaf from the early history of Northern 
Michigan. A road surveyor named Hulbert 
stumbled on to a deserted Indian “cache” of 
native copper at Calumet, in North Michigan, and 
blasting below it discovered a great lode of copper 
conglomerate. Alexander Agassiz’s two sisters 
had married men of some means, and these gentle- 
men acquired the copper-bearing district dis- 
covered by Hulbert, and some _ neighbouring 
copper-bearing land in which Alexander, after in- 
specting it, also secured an interest, borrowing a 
small sum for the purpose. Alexander, who was 
a trained engineer and had gained valuable prac- 
tical knowledge in managing a coal mine, was 
entrusted by his relatives with the job of getting 
the property (which was being mismanaged) into 
working order. He gave up his work at the 
museum and made the great effort of his life. 
Meeting in the streets of Boston his friend Charles 
W. Eliot, who later became President of Harvard, 
he said :— 
“Eliot, I am going to Michigan for some years 
as superintendent of the Calumet and Hecla mines. 
I want to make money; it is impossible to be a 
productive naturalist in this country without 
money. I am going to get some money if I can, 
and then I will be a naturalist. If I succeed I 
can then get my own papers and drawing’s printed, 
and help father at the museum.” 
Seldom, indeed, as his biographer remarks, 
have the aspirations of youth proved in such 
harmony with the achievements of maturity. 
Agassiz stayed from the early spring of 1867 to 
October, 1868, in the wild region where the copper 
mines were situated. He entirely altered the 
method of extraction, introduced new machinery 
on a very large scale, chose his subordinate 
officials with unerring judgment, and was the 
very life and soul of the place; but it nearly killed 
him, and, in fact, he never recovered from the 
strain and exhaustion of that eighteen months. 
In the midst of it he writes to his brother-in- 
law :— 
“Keep up-courage, and never give up. We 
shall be all right yet. The thing I drive and look 
NO. 2309, VOL. 92| 
] after is the only thing that goes; and just as fast 
as I pass from one thing to,another, just so fast 
do things move. There is not a thing done, down 
to seeing that cars get unloaded, which I don’t 
have to look after myself, and some days I am in 
utter despair.” 
By October, 1868, he had overcome all diffi- 
culties and opposition and returned to the more 
congenial labours of the man of science awaiting 
him at Harvard. Ever afterwards, even to the 
end of his life, he paid a visit to the mines in the 
spring and another in the autumn, and more than 
one voyage of exploration was postponed owing to 
an unsatisfactory condition at the mine that re- 
quired his personal attention. His care was given 
not only to profits, but to the welfare of his 
employés. A few years ago the Governor of 
Michigan said that there was one man who had 
done more than all others in that country for 
humane and reasonable conditions of life among 
its working people—Alexander Agassiz. 
In August, 1868, the Hecla and Calumet mines 
produced 330 tons of refined copper. In 1909 the 
product of refined copper for the year was at the 
rate of 4000 tons a month. The area which has_ 
been mined and opened up in the region of the 
conglomerate lode since Agassiz set it going can 
be measured now in square miles, the shafts and 
’ 
drifts amount to 200 miles in length, and 37. 
million tons of rock have been lifted, gooo tons 
are removed every day, and 5600 men are em- 
ployed in the works. 
the company has paid to its stock-holders the huge 
last resort to prop up a failing enterprise, Alex- 
ander Agassiz transformed it into one of the most 
prosperous and extensive mines known in the 
history of industry. He has left the mine as a 
remarkable proof of his extraordinary executive 
ability and business foresight. Few men can show 
such a monument as the result of a life’s work; 
a man whose life’s interest was abstract science. 
And to scientific research and the realisation of his 
father’s great project of a vast museum he devoted 
the leisure and the wealth which now became his. 
“His versatile and restless energy (writes his 
son) covered an extraordinarily wide field. The 
morphologist considers his earlier work the most 
important; the geologist that his reputation 
rests chiefly on his extensive investigations of 
coral reefs; the zoologist remembers his vast 
collections of marine life gathered in a dozen 
extended voyages widely scattered over the surface 
of the globe; and to still others he appears as 
the creator of a vast museum and one of the 
greatest benefactors of the oldest university in 
Since the Hecla and — 
Calumet mines paid their first dividend in 1869, — 
sum of 20 million pounds sterling. Called as a_ 
yet in this case it was the by-product of the brain of 
