Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/430

424 In his treatment of assistants and collaborators he displayed a most commendably unselfish spirit, and indeed the only differences I experienced during eight years in which I served as his assistant were occasioned in persuading him to permit his name to appear as the senior author of publications which were actually the result of our joint efforts.

Labor at the copper mines made enormous drains upon his seemingly inexhaustible energy, for during the early years of his connection with the company he worked upon an average of fourteen and a half hours each day. Yet arduous as these duties were between 1867 and 1874 they made but little difference in the output of his scientific work, for in this period he produced 19 papers, one of them being his famous "Revision of the Echini." Another announces the discovery that Tornaria is undoubtedly the larva of Balanoglossus, and in another he proves that the peculiar pincer-like organs found upon the echini are in reality only highly modified spines, and they serve to keep the animal clean by actually grasping and removing detritus from the surface of the creature. In another work of this period he presents a paper illustrated by 202 excellent figures and giving a complete account of the embryology of those most diaphanous of marine animals, the Ctenophoræ.

Indeed it may be said that while his later work was far more elaborate and widely known, it was not more brilliant than that of this period which closed with his fortieth year, and these older papers are of such fundamental importance that they are quoted in all general textbooks of zoology. We see then that these days of his early manhood between 1861 and 1873 were rich in achievement in science, and remarkable in other respects, for it was during this period that he raised himself from poverty to wealth more than sufficient to meet the demands of his expensive researches in zoology.

But the "happy old days" were soon to pass away forever from the life of Alexander Agassiz, for on December 14, 1873, his great father died, and to deepen his misery his wife to whom he was devotedly attached passed away only eight days after his father's death, and his own health, undermined by too strenuous labor, failed so seriously that throughout the remainder of his life he suffered from an impairment of the circulation which obliged him to seek a warm climate every winter.

Those who knew him in his happier years say that from this time onward a great change was observed in him. These irreparable losses came upon him at a time when youth was gone, but middle age had hardly come upon him and most things of life were yet in store for him. Henceforth he was to live alone with his sorrow, master always of himself, simple almost to austerity in his tastes, but deprived of that sympathy which only a wife could give, it is but little to be wondered at