ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 421 
After graduating from the Lawrence Scientific School he studied 
chemistry for a few months at Harvard, and then taught in his father’s 
school for young ladies until 1859, when he was appointed an assistant 
on the U. 8. Survey, and departed to take part in the task of charting 
the region of the mouth of the Columbia River, Oregon, and in estab- 
lishing the northwest boundary. During this visit to the Pacific coast 
he found time in intervals of travel between official duties to study the 
fishes and meduse of San Francisco harbor and Puget Sound, and to 
collect specimens at Acapulco and Panama for his father’s museum; 
but after a year’s absence he acceded to his father’s earnest request 
and came home to Cambridge to continue his zoological studies and to 
assist in the upbuilding of the great museum which was the dream of 
his father’s life. 
We now come to the period of the beginning of his scientific pro- 
ductivity, for in 1859 he published his first paper—a brief address 
before the Boston Society of Natural History upon the mechanism of 
the flight of Lepidoptera. It seems strange that this first paper of one 
who was destined to devote his life to the study of marine animals and 
to the sea should have been upon butterflies and moths. Moreover, it is 
his only paper save one upon a mechanical principle underlying animal 
activity, his later work in zoology being of a systematic, descriptive or 
embryological character. 
These years when he worked by his father’s side and assisted him 
from the time the museum was formally opened in 1860 until 1866 
when he went to Michigan to develop the Calumet and Hecla copper 
mine were probably the happiest of his life. At first he had charge of 
the alcoholic specimens, of the exchanges and the business management 
of the museum—sufficient to swamp an ordinary man; but he was a 
hercules of energy and_executive power, and his remarkable ability as 
an organizer probably saved the museum from many an embarrassment 
which his father’s buoyant enthusiasm and simple faith in destiny might 
have brought upon it. He had much of that ardent love of the study 
of nature which was his father’s own, but it was tempered and controlled 
by a more conservative judgment and a keener insight into the motives 
of men, so that the two working in sympathy together made an ideal 
team for drawing the museum upward from obscurity to prominence; 
for these early days were critical ones in its history. In 1866, when 
his father was absent in Brazil, Alexander Agassiz had entire charge 
of the museum. 
On November 15, 1860, he married Miss Anna Russell, daughter of 
George R. Russell, a leading merchant of Boston. The wedding took 
place at the home of the bride’s brother-in-law, Dr. Theodore Lyman. 
Arduous as his official duties were from 1859 to 1866, when he 
studied in the museum at Cambridge, they did not prevent his accom- 
