AGASSIZ AT PENIKESE. 139 
The first plan suggested was that of calling the 
teachers of the country together for a summer out- 
ing on the island of Nantucket. Before the site 
was chosen, Mr. John Anderson, a wealthy tobacco- 
merchant in New York City, offered to Agassiz the 
use of his island of Penikese, and an endowment of 
fifty thousand dollars in money, if he would per- 
manently locate this scientific ** camp-meeting” on 
the island. To this gift Mr. C. W. Galloupe, of 
Boston, added the use of his large yacht, the 
“Sprite.” Thus was founded the Anderson School 
of Natural History on the island of Penikese. 
Penikese is a little island containing about sixty 
acres of very rocky ground, a pile of stones with 
intervals of soil. It is the last and least of the 
Elizabeth Islands, lying to the south of Buzzard’s_ 
Bay, on the south coast of Massachusetts. The 
whole cluster was once a great terminal moraine of 
rocks and rubbish of all sorts, brought down from 
the mainland by some ancient glacier, and by it 
dropped into the ocean off the heel of Cape Cod. 
The sea has broken up the moraine into eight little 
islands by wearing tide channels between hill and 
hill. The names of these islands are recorded in 
the jingle which the children of that region learn 
before they go to school, — 
“ Naushon, Nonamesset, Uncatena, and Wepecket, 
Nashawena, Pesquinese, Cuttyhunk, and Penikese.” 
“ 
And Penikese, last and smallest of them, lies, a little 
forgotten speck, out in the ocean, eighteen miles 
south of New Bedford. It contained two hills, 
joined together by a narrow isthmus, a little har- 
