32 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
Eventually Agassiz established himself in East Boston, 
and in 1848 after the canton of Neuchatel ceased to be 
a dependency of the Prussian kingdom and he had been 
honorably discharged from the service of the King of 
Prussia, he accepted the chair of Natural History at the 
Lawrence Scientific School, then a newly organized de- 
partment of Harvard University. The spring of that year, 
accordingly, found him established in Cambridge in a small 
house on Oxford Street. But the favorable prospects that 
were opening before him were soon shadowed by the death 
of his wife, and his sense of loss was intensified by the sepa- 
ration from his children, whom he considered too young 
to bring to America. A sketch of his life at this time has 
been given in his biography by Mrs. Agassiz, which is 
quoted here as her own description of the community in 
which she was soon to take her place. 
The college was then on a smaller scale than now, 
but upon its list of professors were names which would 
have given distinction to any university. In letters, 
there were Longfellow and Lowell, and Felton, the 
genial Greek scholar of whom Longfellow himself 
wrote, ‘‘In Attica thy birthplace should have been.” 
In science, there were Peirce, the mathematician, and 
Dr. Asa Gray, then just installed at the Botanical 
Garden, and Jeffries Wyman, the comparative anato- 
mist, appointed at about the same time with Agassiz 
himself... . 
In connection with these names, those of Prescott, 
Ticknor, Motley, and Holmes also arise most natur- 
ally, for the literary men and scholars of Cambridge 
and Boston were closely united; and if Emerson, in his 
