440 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
the two, for during the course of his long and honored life Alexander 
Agassiz had been granted many interviews with exalted personages, 
but his meeting with Bismarck was the only one to which he delighted 
to refer. Alexander Agassiz was a colossal leader of great enterprises, 
fully as much as he was a man of science. 
The cold winters of Cambridge were intolerable to him, and each 
year from 1875 until the close of his life he sought a more genial 
climate. Upon these pleasure excursions he visited Mexico, Central 
America, the West Indies, India, Ceylon, Japan, the readily accessible 
parts of Africa, and every country in Europe. He never went far into 
the arctic regions, although he saw the midnight sun at North Cape 
and visited the Aleutian Islands. Upon all excursions of the last 
twenty years of his life his constant companion and friend was his son 
Maximilian. 
In 1896 in collaboration with Dr. W. McM. Woodworth he published 
a paper upon the variations of 3,917 specimens of the medusa Obelia 
(Eucope), in which the authors show that aberrant specimens of Obelia 
are very common. ‘This paper is illustrated by interesting photographs 
made from life by Dr. Woodworth. This is one of the last of the studies 
published by him from his Newport laboratory, the latest one being in 
1898 upon the seyphomedusa Dactylometra. 
From November, 1897, to January, 1898, he cruised among the 
Fiji Islands in the little steamer Yaralla, chartered from the Australian 
United Steam Navigation Company and under the command of Cap- 
tain W. C. Thomson. 
Dana had stated that the coral reefs of the Fiji Islands were typical 
examples of the theory of Darwin, and Agassiz was greatly surprised 
therefore to find the clearest evidence of elevation, for in some places, 
as at Vatu Vara Island, the late Tertiary limestones are lifted more 
than 1,000 feet above the sea. This great elevation, which is so evident 
in numerous places among the Fiji Islands, probably took place in later 
Tertiary times and since then the islands have been greatly eroded and 
reduced in size, deep valleys being cut into their mountain slopes and 
many of the islands having been washed away by the tropical rains, 
leaving only a submerged flat. The coral reefs that grew around the 
shore line of the islands still remain after the islands have washed 
away, and thus the living reefs now mark the contours of the islands as 
they were. ‘The currents flowing in and out of openings in the reef- 
rim have deepened the lagoons, but nevertheless there are many coral 
heads growing in the lagoon of every coral atoll. 
He saw that the coral reefs which grew around a volcanic mountain 
remain after the mountain has washed away, and thus an atoll is formed 
without the agency of subsidence. In other cases, as at Fulangia, there 
was once an elevated coral limestone island lifted above sea-level. Then 
