ies of objects. Then a great calamity happened: Jeffries
Wyman died.

Wyman had been the soul of the whole enterprise. At the founding of the
museum he gave up those studies in anatomy and natural history which had
made him famous and furnished him so sure a foundation as an
anthropologist, in order to devote himself entirely to the new
enterprise. His death occurred in September, 1874, closely following
that of his great associate in Cambridge, Louis Agassiz.

Dr. Wyman had found an eager companion in his studies and excursions,
during several years preceding his death, in Frederick W. Putnam, who
was almost the only man in the neighborhood of Boston having either
interest or capability (not to speak of opportunity) for such pursuits.
A Salem lad, he was one of that group of students whom the elder Agassiz
gathered round him when he began teaching at Harvard,--a group
comprising Alpheus Hyatt, A. E. Verrill, J. A. Allen, Edward S. Morse,
N. S. Shaler, A. S. Packard, Jr., and others now of worldwide
reputation. Putnam was an all-round zoologist, but his specialty was
fishes. Accident, nearly thirty years ago, turned his attention to the
shell-heaps and the primitive implements of his home-neighborhood. The
only man to whom he could go for guidance in studying these was Dr.
Jeffries Wyman, at that time his instructor in comparative anatomy. Thus
the two men were drawn more and more together, and when Wyman organized
the new museum Putnam found much time for helping him, although at that
time he was in charge of the Salem Museum, an editor of "The American
Naturalist," a publisher, and the permanent secretary of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, a position which he still
retains. It happened, consequently, that upon Dr. Wyman's decease Mr.
Putnam was the only man suitable and available to become his successor,
and he was quickly appointed to fill the vacancy.

Sixty thousand dollars of the original fund had been set aside by
Peabody as a building-fund, but he decreed that this sum should be
allowed to grow until it amounted to at least a hundred thousand
dollars. This limit was attained in ten years, and in 1876 a building
was begun for the accommodation of the museum. The college gave the
ground,--a lot on Divinity Avenue, nearly opposite the old Divinity
School, and close to the great structure occupied by the Museum of
Comparative Zoology. Surrounded by green lawns and avenues of old trees,
it