Abstract
THE Annual Report of Prof. A. Agassiz for 1887–88 has 1 been issued. It gives the usual interesting account of the various courses of instruction which have been provided at the Museum during the academic year, and of the reports from the several officers about the collections under their care. Excellent progress has been made with the extensive addition to the Museum building, in which there will he ample accommodation for the geological and geographical departments. While numerous specimens have been sent to specialists, a number of applications have from necessity been refused, as the Museum staff is very far from being large enough to meet the demand on its time which attention to all such applications would require. For the future, the very reasonable rule has been laid down that only single specimens for special study can be sent out from the Museum, so that the larger collections must be studied at the Museum, where, we may add, they may be examined with every advantage. In an appendix, a list of the publications of the Museum during the past year will be found, and there is also a most important list of all its publications from the commencement: the Annual Report from 1859, the Bulletin from 1863, the Memoirs from 1864. In a footnote comment is made on some remarks appearing in the preface to the Zoologischer Jahresbericht for 1886, on the irregular way in which the publications of the Museum appear. We only allude to this to express our hope that no criticisms will alter the present arrangement, which is one that allows of the prompt publication of the various new facts brought to light by the band of workers at Harvard. We can conceive that by a librarian, simply as such, the publication of a volume in parts is held in abhorrence, and the publication of parts of two or three volumes of a series, at the one time, fills him with dismay; but to the working student it is very different, and such owe a great deal of gratitude to the Curator of the Museum at Harvard, for the speedy publication of the Museum Memoirs as well as for the great liberality with which these are immediately posted to Europe on their issue from the press. The following paragraph we read with mingled feelings of regret and pleasure:—“In the past fifteen years I have been in the habit of supplying deficiencies for such expenditures as see ned to rne essential for the rapid development of such an establishment. But it has now become evident that, while such a policy may have been useful in the early stages of the Museum, it has of late been rather a detriment to it than otherwise, as it was fast coming to be regarded as my personal establishment. The demands upon my time for the administration of the affairs have become so great, that I must retire from active duty to devote myself to scientific work, which I have too long neglected for the sake of bringing the Museum to the point it has reached. It is high time that I should withdraw, and that a younger man, more in sympathy with the prevailing tendency of science in this country, should endeavour to develop the Museum by increasing the interest of the friends of the University in its behalf.” We fail to comprehend how any man living could be more in sympathy with modern science than Alexander Agassiz, but we recognize as a fact that he has original work to finish, while it is yet day, and it is universally acknowledged that he has established such a must urn at Harvard as may employ the energies of many workers for years to come.
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The Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard College . Nature 39, 595 (1889). https://doi.org/10.1038/039595a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039595a0