Show STUDENT LIFE Through the good offices of his not 147 only respectable but really friend Lyell he was invited to fashionable The following year he was electAmerica to deliver a course of leced tures in Boston The Prussian govprofessor of natural history in the thouLawrence Scientific School of him three ernment granted Harvard which position he acceptsand dollars to investigate the nated and set to work organizing the ural history of the country and arMuseum of Comparative Zoology with these two commissions he rived in 1846 in the land that was Like all his undertakings this from the beginning was gigantic in condestined to he his future home His coming was auspicious lie ception and with his usual faith he was in the prime of a vigorous manbegan a most extensive collecting hood and already famous as a scipiling up his treasures in an old barn until he succeeded iirinterest-in- g entist With his commanding perothers in his growing needs and sonality and pleasing manner he a a was a natural orator possessing building was provided His scientific works in the next wonderful power over an audience and he loved the footlights as an quarter of a centurv were numerous Those of the Old and varied actor and reveled in dramatic situW been had World ( where ations From the )ld orld largely systematic scientists abound and one more is or with only an undercurrent of anhut an added star in an already atomy and ecology Here with the wealth of new material awaiting his brilliant cluster to the Xew World hand it would have been but naturwhere the workers were few and al to have followed that path but biological science was still strugwith the change in country came a gling against popular indifference or even disapproval was a change change in the man and with it a which opened to him an unbounded change in his scientific work Morfield of new opportunities phology development and the life relations were now the dominant Zoology was unknown to most factors He took up the Coelenter-at- a schools and musty and worthless in and published several important many more dealing with systems and abstractions and forgetting life papers “A Textbook of Zoology” Scientific workers struggled along by Agassiz and Gould was far ahead of anything that had apwithout help and without recognition Into these conditions Agassiz peared before The “Contributions to the Natural History of the Unitbrought his wonderful personality his unbounded optimism and his ed States” were started on the same dramatic force People flocked to magnificent scale as were his Old World publications and like most hear his lectures his house became of them were never completed the center of scientific activities and he was taken up by society An Four volumes appeared but his time was too much occupied with interest in natural history became |