Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/745

Rh merchant in New York city, offered to Agassiz the use of his island of Penikese, together with a large yacht and an endowment of fifty thousand dollars in money, if he would permanently locate this scientific "camp-meeting" on the island. Thus was founded the Anderson School of Natural History on the island of Penikese.

Penikese is a little island containing about sixty acres of very rocky ground, a pile of stones, with intervals of soil. It is the last and least of the Elizabeth Islands, lying to the south of Buzzard's Bay, on the south coast of Massachusetts. The whole cluster was once a great terminal moraine of rocks and rubbish of all sorts, brought down from the mainland by some ancient glacier, and by it dropped into the ocean off the heel of Cape Cod. The sea has broken up the moraine into eight little islands by wearing tide channels between hill and hill. The names of these islands are recorded in the jingle which the children of that region learn before they go to school:

 Naushon, Nonamesset, Uncatena, and Wepecket, Nashawena, Pesquinese, Cuttyhunk, and Penikese."

And Penikese, last and smallest of them, lies, a little forgotten speck, out in the ocean, eighteen miles south of New Bedford. It contains two hills, joined together by a narrow isthmus, a little harbor, a farm-house, a flag-staff, a barn, a willow tree, and a flock of sheep. And here Agassiz founded his school. This was in the month of June in the year 1873.

From the many hundred applicants who sent in their names as soon as the school was made public Agassiz chose fifty—thirty men, twenty women—teachers, students, and naturalists of various grades from all parts of the country. This practical recognition of coeducation was criticised by many of Agassiz's friends, trained in the monastic schools of New England, but the results soon justified the decision. These fifty teachers should be trained so far as he could train them in right methods of work. They should carry into their schools his own views of scientific teaching. Then each of these schools would become in its time a center of help to others, until the influence toward real work in science should spread throughout our educational system.

None of us will ever forget his first sight of Agassiz. We had come down from New Bedford in a little tug-boat in the early morning, and Agassiz met us at the landing-place on the island. He was standing almost alone on the little wharf, and his great face beamed with pleasure. For this summer school, the thought of his old age, might be the crowning work of his lifetime. Who could foresee what might come from the efforts of fifty men and women, teachers of science, each striving to do his work in the