THE AGASSIZ SCHOOL’ 57 
a gold mine in Brazil and carry it home and plant it in the 
Museum grounds and dig up a great lump as big as my 
head whenever anything is wanted there.” That her inter- 
est was not purely sentimental, but was highly intelligent 
as well is shown by the letter given below on page 93, 
and also by the following quotation from an article in 
the Boston Evening Transcript for April 23, 1907, by her 
old friend Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson: 
Nature had made [Agassiz] a delightful lecturer and 
art had added a skilful adaptation to his audience 
which secured an annual appropriation for his Mu- 
seum for years after the Massachusetts Legislature 
had stopped all similar appropriations, except this. 
I once watched him in this process of persuasion when 
I went in with a large committee of that honorable 
body to observe his ways. Asked to address them he 
would begin in the simplest manner and shoot on and 
on, charming all with his heartiness; and when after a 
moment’s pause some veteran country member would 
stumble in with the shy question, “‘This is most in- 
teresting, but may we not interrupt the professor to 
give us from a practical view some illustration of the 
actual value of all this that we may carry to the 
Legislature?” ... Agassiz would eagerly say, ‘“O, I 
thank the gentleman for his suggestion; that is just 
what I was coming to. I am glad to inform you that 
we have just in hand a new experiment which would 
alone be a sufficient vindication of this whole appro- 
priation....” This being explained with zest, they 
would break up the meeting and look about the Mu- 
