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AGASSIZ ASSOCIATION 
Established 1875 Incorporated. Massachusetts, 1892 Incorporated. Connecticut. 1910 
Our Best and Unique Testimonial. 
Implicit Confidence by Our Friends in Our Future Growth and Prosperity. 
W HO was that wise and laconic 
philosopher who said. “Institu- 
tions that the people really want 
do not need to be endowed”? \\ hoever 
he was, he was only partly right. He 
voiced a phase of the great truth but 
only a phase. It is true that some insti- 
tutions have been endowed far beyond 
what they need for efficiency. It is also 
true that endowments have continued 
some institutions that the world does 
not need. 
Then too there is a third point that 
endowments have not aided a Cause 
but have lifted the responsibility from 
people living who should carry that 
responsibility. Life is real, life is earn- 
est and life is present. Humanity quite 
rightly has a benefit of the heritage and 
advancement of the past, but it should 
also never be forgotten that work is for 
the worker and some of the greatest 
joys of this world are in carrying re- 
sponsibilities. 
Unique among all humanitarian, edu- 
cational and uplifting organizations is 
The Agassiz Association. Never, al- 
though it is almost half a century old, 
has it had a gift in a will. It did re- 
ceive five hundred dollars from the 
executors of the will of the late Pauline 
Agassiz Shaw because it was evident 
from personal letters that she so wished 
that to be, continuing at any rate for 
another year her gift of one hundred 
and twenty-five dollars every three 
months, but aside from that, notwith- 
standing the liberal gifts of many 
philanthropists while living, no one has 
remembered The Agassiz Association 
in a will. 
At first thought that is very dis- 
couraging, but upon more careful con- 
sideration it is not wholly so. Our 
friends have recognized the worthiness 
of the organization during their lives 
and, so far as the work they have helped 
sustain is concerned, they have para- 
phrased the words of Bryant — they 
have approached the grave sustained 
and soothed by an unfaltering trust 
that the work they had helped would be 
carried on by some one else, and they 
have left the burden 
“Like one who wraps the drapery of his 
couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant 
dreams.” 
It is not only astonishingly encourag- 
ing that so many of our good friends 
who have gone over to the Great Un- 
known had evidently implicit confi- 
dence that the work they had helped 
sustain would go effectively on but it 
puts upon the living a great responsi- 
bility. And it also issues an encourag- 
ing call to our new friends who are 
constantly coming to us. 
To give, to cooperate in the work of 
a thoroughly noble organization is a 
real pleasure and no one has ever been 
lacking in appreciation of the friends 
of The Agassiz Association to deprive 
others of that pleasure. This point of 
view is nicely expressed by one of the 
best friends The Agassiz Association 
ever had, the late Commodore E. C. 
Benedict of Greenwich. His repeated 
gifts in moderate sums amounted to 
two thousand dollars. He was thus the 
most generous of our benefactors in 
recent years. Not many months before 
his death he made this statement to the 
manager of The Agassiz Association : 
“I have had it in mind for some time 
to give you ten thousand dollars but 
