I recall him first on a day soon after our entrance into college in 1851.  A civic celebration was to take place in Boston, and the Harvard students were to march in the procession.  That day I first heard Fair Harvard, sonorously rendered by the band at the head of our column, as we formed on the Beacon Street mall before the State House.  A boy of sixteen, dressed in gray, came down the steps to take his place in our class—­a handsome fellow, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, trimly built, and well-grown for his years.  His face had a foreign air, and when he spoke a peculiarity marked his speech.  This he never lost, but it was no imperfection.  Rather it gave distinction to his otherwise perfect English.  In the years of our course, we met daily.  He was a good general scholar but with a preference from the first for natural science and mathematics.  He matured into handsome manhood, and as an athlete was among the best.  He was a master of the oar, not dropping it on graduation, but long a familiar figure on the Charles.  Here incidentally he left upon the University a curious and lasting mark.  The crew one day were exercising bare-headed on the Back Bay, when encountering stress of weather, Agassiz was sent up into the city to find some proper head-gear.  He presently returned with a package of handkerchiefs of crimson, which so demonstrated their convenience and played a part on so many famous occasions, that crimson became the Harvard colour.

Alexander was soon absorbed in the whirl of life, and to what purpose he worked I need not here detail.  The story of the Calumet and Hecla Company is a kind of commercial romance which the harshest critics of American business life may read with pleasure.  At the same time Agassiz was only partially and transiently a business-man, returning always with haste from the mine and the counting-room to the protracted scientific researches in which his heart mainly lay.  His voyages in the interest of science were many and long.  He studied not so much the shores as the sea itself.  Oceanographer is the term perhaps by which he may best be designated.  By deep sea soundings he mapped the vast beds over which the waters roll and reached an intimacy with the life of its most profound abysses.  Sitting next him at a class dinner, an affair of dress-suits, baked meats, and cigars at the finish, I found his talk took one far away from the prose of the thing.  He was charming in conversation, and he set forth at length his theory as to the work of the coral insects, formed after long study of the barrier reefs and atolls of remote seas.  His ideas were subversive of those of Darwin, with whom he disputed the matter before Darwin died.  They are now well-known and I think accepted, though unfortunately he died before setting them forth in due order.  They are revolutionary in their character as to the origin of formations that enter largely into the crust of the earth.  In this field he stood as originator and chief.  He gave me glimpses of the wonderful indeed, as we cracked our almonds and sipped the sherbet, his rich voice and slightly foreign accent running at my ear as we sat under the banquet lights.