cal investigations were continued,
and important works on 'Fossil Mollusks,' 'Tertiary Shells,' and 'Living
and Fossil Echinoderms' date from this period.

He had long desired to visit America, when he realized this wish in 1846
by an arrangement with the Lowell Institute of Boston, where he gave a
series of lectures, afterwards repeated in various cities. So attractive
did he find the fauna and flora of America, and so vast a field did he
perceive here for his individual studies and instruction, that he
returned the following year. In 1848 the Prussian government, which had
borne the expenses of his scientific mission,--a cruise along our
Atlantic coast to study its marine life,--released him from further
obligation that he might accept the chair of geology in the Lawrence
Scientific School of Harvard University. His cruises, his explorations,
and his methods, combined with his attractive personality, gave him
unique power as a teacher; and many of his biographers think that of all
his gifts, the ability to instruct was the most conspicuous. He needed
no text-books, for he went directly to Nature, and did not believe in
those technical, dry-as-dust terms which lead to nothing and which are
swept away by the next generation. Many noted American men of science
remember the awakening influence of his laboratories in Charleston and
Cambridge, his museum at Harvard, and his summer school at Penikese
Island in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, where natural history was
studied under ideal conditions. It was here that he said to his
class:--"A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing
profane should be tolerated." Whittier has left a poem called "The
Prayer of Agassiz," describing

"The isle of Penikese
Ranged about by sapphire seas."

Just as he was realizing two of his ambitions, the establishment of a
great museum and a practical school of zooelogy, he died, December 14th,
1873, at his home in Cambridge, and was buried at Mount Auburn beneath
pine-trees sent from Switzerland, while a bowlder from the glacier of
the Aar was selected to mark his resting-place.

Agassiz was greatly beloved by his pupils and associates, and was
identified with the brilliant group--Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, and
Lowell,--each of whom has written of him. Lowell considered his 'Elegy
on Agassiz,' written in Florence in 1874, among his best verses;
Longfellow wrote a poem for 'The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz,