56 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
country at once, and I should have been living in 
Paris to receive you when you came out this spring. 
The letter was an official appointment to a professor- 
ship in the Jardin des Plantes. It seems strange that 
Agassiz should be in a position to decline a thing 
which when he was a young man he looked upon as 
the very brightest summit of his most ambitious 
dreams of success; for there are no higher scientific 
positions in Europe than those of the professors at the 
Jardin des Plantes. Even now I think it cost him 
something to resign it, but he can do unquestionably 
more for science here than there and his domestic 
relations here are so delightful that he does not hesi- 
tate. It would give him a house in the Jardin, the 
command of the best museums in Europe, for all care 
and expense assistants and appointments of all kinds 
provided, and a salary much better for Paris than 
that he has here, — about $2000.00, I believe, and 
the only work exacted is twenty lectures a year. It 
has a very tempting side, but he intends to refuse it 
at once, so don’t be frightened. 
In the following year partly as a result of Agassiz’s tacit 
implication by his refusal to leave Cambridge for Paris 
that America was the chosen field of his labors, the Mu- 
seum of Comparative Zoélogy (better known as the Agas- 
siz Museum) was established in Cambridge. The organiza- 
tion and development of this Museum became one of the 
most absorbing works of his life and of his son’s, and 
consequently occupied an engrossing place in that of Mrs. 
Agassiz. “T wish,” she wrote once from Brazil, “I could find 
