Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

[772] with so much anxiety, passed off, unclouded by any untoward accident, and at evening the guests had departed. Students and teachers, a company of some fifty or sixty persons, were left to share the island with the sea-gulls whose haunt it was.

We will not enter into the daily details of the school. It was a new phase of teaching, even for Agassiz, old as he was in the work. Most of his pupils were mature men and women, some of whom had been teachers themselves for many years. He had, therefore, trained minds to deal with, and the experience was at that time as novel as it was interesting. The novelty has worn off now. Summer schools for advanced students, and especially for teachers, have taken their place in the general system of education; and, though the Penikese school may be said to have died with its master, it lives anew in many a sea-side laboratory organized on the same plan, in summer schools of Botany and field classes of Geology. The impetus it gave was not, and cannot be, lost, since it refreshed and vitalized methods of teaching.

Beside the young men who formed his corps of teachers, among whom the resident professors were Dr. Burt G. Wilder, of Cornell University,