Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/744

722 he worked with wonderful zeal, which showed its results in the success of everything with which he had to do.

Of the older teachers of biology in America, the men who were born between 1830 and 1850, nearly all who have reached eminence have been at one time or another pupils of Agassiz. The names of Le Conte, Hartt, Shaler, Scudder, Wilder, Putnam, Packard, Clark, Alexander Agassiz, Morse, Lyman, Brooks, Whitman, Garman, Faxon, Fewkes, Minot, and many others not less worthily known, come to our thoughts at once as evidence of this statement.

Even as late as 1873, when Agassiz died, the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy was almost the only school in America where the eager student of natural history could find the work he wanted. The colleges generally taught only the elements of any of the sciences. Twenty years ago original research was scarcely considered as among the functions of the American college. Such investigators as America had were for the most part outside of the colleges, or at the best carrying on their investigations in time stolen from the drudgery of the class-room. One of the greatest of American astronomers was kept for forty years teaching algebra and geometry, with never a student far enough advanced to realize the real work of his teacher. And this case was typical of hundreds before the university spirit was kindled in American schools. That this spirit was kindled in Harvard forty years ago was due in the greatest measure to Agassiz's influence. It was here that graduate instruction in science in America practically began. In an important sense the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy was the first American university.

Notwithstanding the great usefulness of the museum and the broad influence of its teachers, Agassiz was not fully satisfied. The audience he reached was still too small. Throughout the country the great body of teachers of science went on in the old mechanical way. On these he was able to exert no influence. The boys and girls still kept up the humdrum recitations from worthless text-books. They got their lessons from the book, recited them from memory, and no more came into contact with Nature than they would if no animals or plants or rocks existed on this side of the planet Jupiter.

It was to remedy this state of things that Agassiz conceived, in 1872, the idea of a scientific "camp-meeting," where the workers and the teachers might meet together—a summer school of observation where the teachers should be trained to see Nature for themselves and teach others how to see it.

The first plan suggested was that of calling the teachers of the country together for a summer outing on the island of Nantucket. Before the site was chosen, Mr. John Anderson, a wealthy tobacco