408 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



law — is he still at Heligoland ? I wanted to write to him 

 and ask him in regard to his Report on the Comatulae 

 he has in hand from the days of Carpenter. 



A few days before leaving Cambridge I completed 

 my big Report on the Coral Reefs of the Pacific and 

 copies of it ought to be sent out by the end of March, 

 of which you will get one in due course. This leaves 

 me only my Report on the Maldives and a general 

 resume of the whole Coral Reef question, both of which 

 I hope to get out within the year, and then I shall go 

 back again with renewed vigor to my Deep-Sea work. 

 I have a huge Report on the Echini of the Albatross 

 (1891 Ex.), of which nearly ninety Plates are completed, 

 and I hope to go off on another and last expedition to the 

 Pacific to explore the great gap of unknown territory 

 left from Panama to Paumotus and Paumotus to Peru, 

 after which I shall be getting too old to run off in 

 that way, and I shall have to be satisfied with shorter 

 expeditions nearer home, to the West Indies where there 

 is still much to be done. I am hoping to interest the 

 new Carnegie Institution, of which I am one of the 

 Trustees, to join me in this last great Pacific Expe- 

 dition, but the great trouble is to get efficient assistants, 

 and then to have the mass of material obtained worked 

 up by competent naturalists. 



On his way home he delivered a lecture, before the 

 Royal Society, on Coral Reefs — and in the discussion 

 afterwards it was clearly brought out that he had not 

 in all his wanderings seen a single atoll or barrier reef 

 whose formation he could explain by subsidence. Agas- 

 siz was, however, disappointed that there was not more 

 discussion, as most of the members of the Royal Society 



