Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/482

478. Before he occupied this chair, he was engaged in the work of the Nautical Almanac, and founded The Mathematical Monthly in 1859. He took a prominent part in introducing manual training, not only in the institute, but also in the schools of the country.

in America owes much to Louis Agassiz, and one of its greatest debts is the summer school of natural history established by him on the

island of Penikese in 1873, the year before his death. The school did not long survive its founder, but it may be regarded as the beginning of the summer schools and laboratories which now play such an important part in the educational and scientific life of the country. Our college sessions have followed the precedent of Oxford and Cambridge in allowing long summer holidays. Formerly many of the students worked on the farm or otherwise during the summer months, and the heat of the season seemed to make natural a long vacation both in schools and colleges. But it seems to be no longer the case that college students commonly spend the long vacation in a profitable manner, and it has been discovered that teachers have in their holidays great opportunity for study and culture. The conditions have led to a complex and rather heterogeneous provision for education and research during the summer months. We have the Chautauqua movement, based mainly on religious interests, in which many denominations under one name or another have taken part. The school on Martha's Vineyard represented an extension of the teachers' institute, leading the way to the university summer schools. There have been schools for agriculture, for modern languages, for philosophy and of other kinds. But the two movements now the most wide-reaching and likely to be the most permanent are the laboratories of biology and the summer sessions of the universities.

There are obvious reasons for pursuing the study of botany and zoology