Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/446

440 the two, for during the course of his long and honored life Alexander Agassiz had been granted many interviews with exalted personages, but his meeting with Bismarck was the only one to which he delighted to refer. Alexander Agassiz was a colossal leader of great enterprises, fully as much as he was a man of science.

The cold winters of Cambridge were intolerable to him, and each year from 1875 until the close of his life he sought a more genial climate. Upon these pleasure excursions he visited Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, India, Ceylon, Japan, the readily accessible parts of Africa, and every country in Europe. He never went far into the arctic regions, although he saw the midnight sun at North Cape and visited the Aleutian Islands. Upon all excursions of the last twenty years of his life his constant companion and friend was his son Maximilian.

In 1896 in collaboration with Dr. W. McM. Woodworth he published a paper upon the variations of 3,917 specimens of the medusa Obelia (Eucope), in which the authors show that aberrant specimens of Obelia are very common. This paper is illustrated by interesting photographs made from life by Dr. Woodworth. This is one of the last of the studies published by him from his Newport laboratory, the latest one being in 1898 upon the scyphomedusa Dactylometra.

Prom November, 1897, to January, 1898, he cruised among the Fiji Islands in the little steamer Yaralla, chartered from the Australian United Steam Navigation Company and under the command of Captain W. C. Thomson.

Dana had stated that the coral reefs of the Fiji Islands were typical examples of the theory of Darwin, and Agassiz was greatly surprised therefore to find the clearest evidence of elevation, for in some places, as at Vatu Vara Island, the late Tertiary limestones are lifted more than 1,000 feet above the sea. This great elevation, which is so evident in numerous places among the Fiji Islands, probably took place in later Tertiary times and since then the islands have been greatly eroded and reduced in size, deep valleys being cut into their mountain slopes and many of the islands having been washed away by the tropical rains, leaving only a submerged flat. The coral reefs that grew around the shore line of the islands still remain after the islands have washed away, and thus the living reefs now mark the contours of the islands as they were. The currents flowing in and out of openings in the reef-rim have deepened the lagoons, but nevertheless there are many coral heads growing in the lagoon of every coral atoll.

He saw that the coral reefs which grew around a volcanic mountain remain after the mountain has washed away, and thus an atoll is formed without the agency of subsidence. In other cases, as at Fulangia, there was once an elevated coral limestone island lifted above sea-level. Then