The Agassis Association. 195 



a result, it was not long before he was the centre of 

 scientific interest in America. He gathered about 

 him a coterie of briUiant men from all parts of the 

 country, and it is interesting to note that in almost 

 every instance these students, graduates, as it were, 

 of his system and methods of work, have taken posi- 

 tions of the highest rank. Putnam, now director of 

 the Department of Ethnology at the World's Fair; 

 Jordan, President of Leland Stanford Jr. University ; 

 Bickmore, the founder of the American Museum ; 

 Agassiz, his son, an eminent scientist, the head of 

 the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Zoology ; 

 Whitman, of Clark University; Snow, Chancellor of 

 the University of Kansas ; Crosby, of the Boston 

 Natural History Society, Garman, of the Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology, Wilder, Morse, Mayer, Minot, 

 Brooks, and Packard of Boston, and many more are 

 distinguished naturalists of to-day. Agassiz's com- 

 ing to America marked the beginning of a new 

 epoch in American science. He introduced methods 

 of study and investigation unknown. 



Many of his pupils will remember their first days 

 with him, and several have chronicled their experi- 

 ences. To one, now a distinguished entomologist, 

 who went to the great master to perfect himself, was 

 given an echinoderm, with a request to be prepared 

 to tell something about it. To be left alone with an 

 echinoderm, especially if one has never seen the 

 animal before, and expected to describe its charac- 

 teristics, was, to say the least, puzzling, yet the 

 student carefully made his observations and un- 

 wittingly learned the first great precept in the 



