No, 375.] LOUIS AGASSIZ. IKI 
friends and assistants, — Desor, Guyot, Marcou, Pourtalés, 
Girard, Richard, Sonrel, Burckhardt, and others, — so that it 
may be said that the work was merely transferred from the 
Old World to the New, the personnel of the establishment 
being much the same, but the work was changed in character. 
In 1847 came the appointment to the Chair of Zoology and 
Geology in the newly established Lawrence Scientific School 
of Harvard College, and in the winter of 1848 Agassiz began 
his work as an instructor in the New World, — work which 
continued until his death, even the invitation to return to 
Paris as the head of the museum there being insufficient to 
call him back to Europe. 
With this change from the Old World to the New, the work 
of Agassiz changed. It was not only that there was a change 
in the fauna : there was also a change in the man. In Europe 
his work had been largely systematic, although all of his papers 
had a strong substructure of anatomy. In America, surrounded 
as he was by a wealth of new and undescribed forms, one 
‘might have expected him to have become more purely a 
systematist than ever before. He became rather what to-day 
we would call a morphologist, and it is noticeable that in the 
majority of the papers he published in America, the structural 
or developmental side of the subject is the more prominent, 
the descriptions of new species occupying a subsidiary position. 
Domiciled at Cambridge, Agassiz began collecting as never 
before. From all parts of the country specimens were obtained, 
but the only place for storage of them was a barn-like structure 
near the banks of the Charles. His trips. to Charleston, where 
he early received an appointment in the medical school, enabled 
him to make collections in the semitropical waters there, while 
a trip to Lake Superior in 1848 resulted in large fresh-water 
collections. Besides, he arranged for exchanges of specimens 
with the museums of Europe and this country, and soon a 
larger building, a two-storied structure, long known as Zoolog- 
ical Hall, became the home of the specimens. This, however,- 
was not safe from fire. It was built of wood, and, besides, a 
great part of the collections were preserved in alcohol, even 
more inflammable than the building itself. But where the 
