324 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



which you will get in due time. Also a Memoir by 

 Milne Edwards on some more of Blake Crustacea, and 

 a Memoir by Maas on the Albatross Medusae, which 

 should come out shortly. 



The members of the expedition left Boston on Octo- 

 ber 9, 1897, to join the Yaralla. The evening of Novem- 

 ber 6 saw them at the little town of Suva, the capital of 

 Fiji, with its one street of shops, set in a great sweep 

 of low sharp hills, their slopes thickly wooded with 

 tropical vegetation. Here they found the Yaralla, which 

 had been waiting for ten days. The next morning, 

 Agassiz went ashore to present his letters to Sir George 

 O'Brien, the High Commissioner; here he found in 

 Mrs. Allardyce, whose husband was in charge of the 

 native Department, an old acquaintance with whom he 

 had once made a passage from Bombay to Naples. In 

 the midst of his scientific notes one finds, as unexpect- 

 edly as a joke in a mathematical table, the following 

 entry : " Went to see Mr. Allardyce — queer to see man 

 servant with nothing but a loin cloth round him — he 

 served tea to us and two lady callers ! " 



Agassiz supposed he must be coming to a character- 

 istic area of subsidence, since, according to Darwin and 

 Dana, there is no coral reef region in which it is a simpler 

 matter to follow the various formations. For this reason 

 he had thought that one of the atolls here would be an 

 excellent place for boring to decide the thickness of the 

 reef. The preceding letter to Murray suggests, however, 

 that his surprise could not have been entirely unex- 

 pected, when he found, a mile out of Suva, an elevated 

 reef about fifty feet thick and one hundred and twenty 

 feet above the level of the sea ! 



