ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 427 
His experience at Penikese was, however, by no means in vain, for 
it deeply impressed him with the advisability of establishing a summer 
school for research in marine zoology, so that in 1877 he built upon his 
place at Castle Hill at the mouth of Newport Harbor an ideal little re- 
search laboratory which afforded excellent accommodations for half a 
dozen students at a time. For eighteen years students and instructors 
from Harvard College visited this charming spot, and many are the 
papers which resulted from their labors there. Count Pourtalés, W. K. 
Brooks, Fewkes and Whitman were the first workers in the station, and 
each year about ten of the most promising of the research students in 
zoology at Harvard were privileged to study at the Newport Labora- 
tory. Every day a stage bore them from the town, four miles away, to 
the laboratory and back again at five o’clock in the afternoon, after 
the daily swim in the ocean. The laboratory was excellently equipped 
with reagents, glassware and large tanks provided with running salt 
or fresh water. The microscope tables were set upon stone foundations 
to avoid vibration, and a good little steam launch lay at her moorings 
in a near cove ready to dredge in the service of science. I treasure the 
memory of those youthful days at Newport when the enthusiastic spirit 
of our great leader was an inspiration to each and every one of us, and 
I recall his delight over the rare “ finds ” we occasionally discovered in 
the surface tow which was made every night and lay awaiting our 
study in the morning. Gradually, however, a change came over the 
Newport Laboratory, the once pure water of the harbor became more 
and more polluted as population and shipping increased until finally in 
1897 students were no longer invited to come to Newport, and the 
scientific existence of the laboratory ceased. An account of the labora- 
tory together with a plan of the building will be found in Nature, vol- 
ume 19, pp. 317-319, 1879, and in the Century Magazine for Septem- 
ber, 1883, but these fail to give an idea of the attractive little vine- 
clad building nestled down on the slope of the shore overlooking its 
little cove with the beautiful bay to the northward and the ocean on 
the south. 
Alexander Agassiz was the first to see that the southern shore of 
New England was most favorably placed for the site of such a station, 
for he discovered that here arctic forms are carried down during the 
winter and early spring, whereas late in summer the southerly winds 
bring drifting upward from the Gulf Stream animals whose true homes 
are in the warm waters of the tropical Atlantic, and thus one meets 
with an extraordinary seasonal variation of marine life on the southern 
coast of New England. 
In 1874 Alexander Agassiz was elected curator of the museum to 
succeed his father in this responsible position, and indeed the prospects 
of the museum were at that time such as to inspire grave apprehension, 
