204 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
student, who might thus have immortalized himself but 
missed a chance for distinction by failing to claim as his 
invention the name that had no rival for fifteen years in 
spite of more official designations. 
Mrs. Agassiz had been sought as one of the managers, 
apart from her own personality, because of the aims in edu- 
cation with which she had been identified in the Agassiz 
School, one of the objectives in which had been, like that 
of the Committee, to provide instruction for young girls 
from members of the faculty of Harvard College. There can 
be no doubt that it was principally because she regarded 
this movement almost as a continuation of the aims of the 
school that Mrs. Agassiz was ready to take part in it. “But 
for the school,” she wrote toward the end of her life to Miss 
Cary, “the college (so far as I am concerned) would never 
have existed.” Yet in February, 1879, she did not in the 
least foresee the proportions in her life that this new under- 
taking was to assume. The mere fact that in her diary she 
made no record of her invitation to serve on the Committee 
is an indication of how entirely informal the arrangement 
was and how far from important the matter seemed to her. 
At the time of the first meetings she was occupied with the 
revision of her First Lesson in Natural History, of which 
a second edition was about to be issued, and her daily en- 
tries chronicle the stages of her work on this little book, but 
pass by in silence or barely mention many of the meetings 
which Mr. Gilman’s Notes show that she attended. In fact, 
Mrs. Agassiz later admitted that only a conversation with 
President Eliot led her to realize that by putting her signa- 
ture to the first circular she had brought definite responsi- 
bilities upon herself in regard to the care of the prospective 
