strong advocate of a thorough scientific training as a possible alternative for those who preferred it to the regular classical curriculum. But he would have been the first to deplore the present utilitarian tendencies of so-called higher education in America.

His long series of oceanic explorations began in 1877: first for a number of years in the Coast Survey steamer Blake on the Atlantic and the Caribbean; and later in the Fish Commission ship Albatross on the Pacific; supplemented by a number of voyages in chartered vessels to Australia, the Indian Ocean, and the South Seas. Thanks to his experience as a mining engineer, he devised new methods for hoisting the dredge, and new apparatus for collecting; he also adopted the latest methods of sounding, thus greatly increasing the efficiency and revolutionizing the equipment of vessels intended for oceanographic work. The many collections gathered on these expeditions were sent to the specialists all over the world best qualified to describe them; Agassiz reserving for his own study the material in his special fields.

: In the attention to the mass of detail that inevitably envelops such explorations, he never lost sight of the fundamental problems underlying the study of the sea. Sir John Murray, the British authority on oceanography, says that Alexander Agassiz has done more than any other man to enrich our knowledge of the ocean.

During his later years he was much interested in the study of the formation of coral atolls and barrier reefs. Darwin thought that an atoll was formed by the gradual accumulation of coral growth on a slowly subsiding island. Agassiz's conclusions did not accord with this view. He never published his proposed book on coral reefs, and at his death the material was not in a form to be edited by another. But one may gather from a careful perusal of a number of his publications the various causes to which he attributed the formation of atolls, and these have been summarized in his 'Letters and Recollections.'

Darwin when a young man founded his theory on a visit to one atoll; it has nothing whatever to do with his views on evolution. Alexander Agassiz, after having visited most of the coral regions of the world, never saw an atoll or barrier reef that he thought could be satisfactorily explained by subsidence. The site of the

boring on Funafuti, made by the Royal Society to settle the question, was most unfortunately chosen. It settles nothing, and only complicates the issue.

Undoubtedly Alexander Agassiz received more adequate recognition as a naturalist in Europe than he did in America. Many a man who knew him as the efficient president of a singularly successful mining company would have been surprised, and probably but little interested, to learn that he was one of the foremost scientific men of his generation. For we as a nation place little value on what does not lead directly to material ends. With every honor that the scientific world had to give, a man who would have been a familiar figure at any learned meeting in Europe, Agassiz walked unrecognized through the streets of Cambridge, and was content to have it so.

There have been more widely known naturalists, and there have been more conspicuous men of affairs. But as a combination of man of science and creative executive, Alexander Agassiz stands in a class by himself. For no one of such eminence in science ever brought so vast a practical enterprise to so successful an issue.

In the park overlooking Calumet, his statue, by Paul Bartlett, a bronze figure of classic beauty seated in academic robes, serene, dignified, and tinged with the mystery of death, keeps silent watch over a prosperous and contented city, hewn from the wilderness by his wisdom and grit. The pedestal bears this inscription:

ALEXANDER AGASSIZ

1835-1910

A MAN OF SCIENCE

WHO

DEVELOPED A GREAT MINE

AND

WROUGHT THe Welfare oF ITS PEOPLE

G. R. AGASSIZ

RICHARD HENRY DANA, SR.

1787-1879

RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR., was among the founders of the Saturday Club, and is commemorated in "The Early Years.' The anomaly of finding that his father was enrolled as a member seventeen years after the founding, when he was himself eighty-six years old, is explained by the following passage from the diary of R. H. Dana, Jr., found in the second volume of his biography by Charles Francis Adams, Jr. The year in which it was written was 1873:

'(October 28.) Yesterday my father had a great success and pleasure. I took him to the club to dine. We had Emerson, Longfellow, Agassiz, Charles Francis Adams, Sumner, Holmes, Judge Hoar, President Eliot, and others, our usual set; and after a while, Emerson rose and asked a moment's attention and said: "We are gratified to-day, by the presence of Mr. Dana. He has a higher as well as older claim on the respect and honor of men of letters and lovers of literature than any of us here, and we must not let the occasion go by without an expression of our feeling towards him. I propose that, instead of nominating him for election as a regular member of the club, which we would gladly have done years ago, we unanimously declare him an honorary member and permanent guest of the club," etc., etc. Agassiz put the question, and they all rose to their feet in response, and gave him a hearty cheer. It was very gratifying, touching, and in the best possible taste.

'After this, he talked with several members, and among others with Agassiz, whom he had never talked with, and against whose views he was prejudiced; and was delighted with him, especially with the opinions Agassiz expressed about liberal education and the classics, and as to the intuitive as essential to a discoverer, etc. Agassiz said he would never, if he could prevent it, allow a man to begin work in his museum, or in physical science, until he had been through college, and trained and enlarged and elevated his mind by literary studies and philosophy and modes of reasoning applicable to moral science, as well as in those peculiar to the