ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 439 
The voyage began at Brisbane in April, extended northward to the 
Hope Islands and ended at Cooktown in May. Unfortunately, he had 
come to Australia in the height of the trade-wind season, and the almost 
constant gale greatly hindered the work of his expedition. Indeed, dur- 
ing more than a month of cruising he could spend only three days on 
the outer reefs, and the dredging and study of marine life which he 
had hoped to carry out were practically abandoned. 
He concluded that the many islands and submerged flats off the 
Queensland coast were once connected with the mainland, but have been 
separated from the continent by erosion and denudation. After the 
formation of these flats and islands corals grew upon them. The recent 
reefs have been elevated at least ten feet, and do not owe their contours 
to subsidence, yet they form true atolls. The inner channels of the 
Barrier Reef are maintained free of corals by the great amount of silt 
held in suspension in the water or deposited to form a blue mud over 
the bottom. Thus there appears to be nothing in the Great Barrier 
Reef region to lend support to Darwin’s theory of coral reefs. 
A tangible result of this expedition was the enriching of the museum 
at Cambridge by a great collection of Barrier Reef corals gathered under 
Alexander Agassiz’s auspices by H. A. Ward. 
His experience in Australia taught him to avoid the trade-wind 
season and henceforth his expeditions to coral seas were timed so that 
he cruised among the reefs in the late spring and early summer months 
when the trades have died out into the long hot days of calm which 
precede the coming of the hurricanes. This interval when the torrid 
sea is sleeping gave him the opportunity to land on many a jagged shore 
that defied approach at other seasons. He then could wade through the 
still waters over the coral reefs, and unravel at his will the secrets of 
the atolls, composed as they are of wave-tossed fragments that once were 
shells of mollusks or skeletons of creatures of the reefs. His over- 
mastering interest carried him to the shores of hundreds of these distant 
atolls where the cocoa-palm, the Pandanus and the fishes of the reef 
afford the only sustenance for man, where there are no hills or streams 
and the land is only a narrow strip across which one hears constantly 
the roar of heavy breakers. 
These years of cruising accentuated his already predominant self- 
reliance, for the commander of a marine expedition must needs be an 
autocrat by profession. He was accustomed to command and to be 
obeyed and his relation to the Harvard Museum during these later 
years was in miniature similar to that of Bismarck to the German 
empire. Indeed, there was a strange physical and mental resemblance 
between Alexander Agassiz and Bismarck. Fearless, resolute, quick 
to anger, definitely purposeful and full of resource, they were closely 
akin in character, and indeed there seemed much in common between 
