Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/427

Rh After graduating from the Lawrence Scientific School he studied chemistry for a few months at Harvard, and then taught in his father's school for young ladies until 1859, when he was appointed an assistant on the U. S. Survey, and departed to take part in the task of charting the region of the mouth of the Columbia River, Oregon, and in establishing the northwest boundary. During this visit to the Pacific coast he found time in intervals of travel between official duties to study the fishes and medusae of San Francisco harbor and Puget Sound, and to collect specimens at Acapulco and Panama for his father's museum; but after a year's absence he acceded to his father's earnest request and came home to Cambridge to continue his zoological studies and to assist in the upbuilding of the great museum which was the dream of his father's life.

We now come to the period of the beginning of his scientific productivity, for in 1859 he published his first paper—a brief address before the Boston Society of Natural History upon the mechanism of the flight of Lepidoptera. It seems strange that this first paper of one who was destined to devote his life to the study of marine animals and to the sea should have been upon butterflies and moths. Moreover, it is his only paper save one upon a mechanical principle underlying animal activity, his later work in zoology being of a systematic, descriptive or embryological character.

These years when he worked by his father's side and assisted him from the time the museum was formally opened in 1860 until 1866 when he went to Michigan to develop the Calumet and Hecla copper mine were probably the happiest of his life. At first he had charge of the alcoholic specimens, of the exchanges and the business management of the museum—sufficient to swamp an ordinary man; but he was a hercules of energy and executive power, and his remarkable ability as an organizer probably saved the museum from many an embarrassment which his father's buoyant enthusiasm and simple faith in destiny might have brought upon it. He had much of that ardent love of the study of nature which was his father's own, but it was tempered and controlled by a more conservative judgment and a keener Insight into the motives of men, so that the two working in sympathy together made an ideal team for drawing the museum upward from obscurity to prominence; for these early days were critical ones in its history. In 1866, when his father was absent in Brazil, Alexander Agassiz had entire charge of the museum.

On November 15, 1860, he married Miss Anna Russell, daughter of George R. Russell, a leading merchant of Boston. The wedding took place at the home of the bride's brother-in-law, Dr. Theodore Lyman. Arduous as his official duties were from 1859 to 1866, when he studied in the museum at Cambridge, they did not prevent his