Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/439

Rh of the "Memoirs" had been completed, and yet these publications had been appearing in parts for fourteen and thirteen years, respectively. The reports upon the great collections gathered by Alexander Agassiz's expeditions gave these museum publications an enormous impetus, so that at the time of his death in 1910 the fifty-fourth volume of the "Bulletin" and the fortieth of the "Memoirs" were appearing.

Alexander Agassiz realized that the government had always failed to provide adequately for the publication of the results of its many explorations, and thus he himself assumed the direction, and defrayed the entire expense, of all of the publications resulting from expeditions under government auspices of which he was the scientific director. No results of explorations have been more appropriately published or better illustrated than those under the auspices of Alexander Agassiz.

Alexander Agassiz did most wisely also in sending the various collections not only to specialists in America but to the leading students in Europe and Japan, thus securing the cooperation of those best competent to pronounce upon them.

During the first cruise of the Blake he discovered that the prevailing winds blowing over the Gulf Stream caused a marked concentration of floating life upon its western edge, and that this aggregation was nowhere richer than at the Tortugas, Florida. Accordingly under government auspices he visited the Tortugas in March and April, 1881, with Dr. J. W. Fewkes as his assistant. Although greatly hindered by stormy weather, he succeeded in securing a large collection of marine animals, notably the Porpitidæ and Velellidæ, an elaborate and fully illustrated account of which he published in 1883; and in the same year in the "Memoirs" of the American Academy he presented the results of his studies of the fine coral reefs of the Tortugas.

His "Blake" Echini appeared in 1883; and in 1888 came his last "Blake" publication, a general account of her three notable cruises. This crowning work comes nearer to being a popular book than anything he, as sole author, ever published. It is a general review of the results of the Blake's voyages between 1877 and 1880, and it appears in volumes 14 and 15 of the "Bulletins" of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, being illustrated by 545 maps and figures of the highest artistic and scientific merit.

It is rarely indeed that the results of exploration have been thus summarized in a single work, and none gives a clearer idea of the strange forms of the creatures that live upon the cold dark floor of the deep-sea than does this one.

The results may be significantly summarized by stating that we now know more of the topography and of the animals of the depths of the Gulf Stream and West Indian region than of any submarine area of equal extent in the world, and that this knowledge, is due to the