COMMEMORATION ADDRESSES — 395 
brings us all here, and encourages me to address you, 
however inadequately. 
For, to go back from Radcliffe College to Agassiz 
School is something like going back to the nursery. 
Yet the nursery holds an important place, and 
surely the good seed sown in Agassiz School has blos- 
somed in Radcliffe College! 
To the seventy school-girls or more, between the 
ages of fifteen and eighteen, who every morning came 
running up the staircase to the third story of Mrs. 
Agassiz’s home in Quincy Street, to their cheerful, 
well-lighted, well-warmed, and well-ventilated class- 
rooms, the phrase “Higher Education of Women” 
was unknown. Yet, like M. Jourdain, who had spoken 
prose all his life without knowing it, we had the 
Higher Education offered to us. Indeed we had the 
Highest Education: the daily contact with superior 
minds imbued with a desire to impart their know]- 
edge to us, to give us high standards, to awaken wide 
interests. And thus we school-girls had a glimpse and 
foretaste of the good things that were coming to 
women all the world over, and we can especially re- 
joice in Radcliffe’s adult strength, in its organized 
growth and power. 
In her Life of Louis Agassiz, Mrs. Agassiz gives a 
few pages to the School. It owed its existence, she 
states, as many another school has done, to the desire 
of the wife, the son, the daughter, to lift a burden 
from the head of the family. The plans, she relates, 
were discussed in secret between the three, but, when 
the conspirators with many misgivings unfolded their 
