about their anatomy. At any rate the first thing he did was to give me
a badly mutilated old loon, from old alcohol, telling me to prepare the
skeleton. This I did so well and so quickly that he expressed regret
that he had not given me some better bird with unbroken bones. He gave
me next a blue heron, but it being spring, I 'went collecting' in the
vicinity, following my usual inclination, before breakfast and after
laboratory hours, and brought in a number of incubated birds'-eggs.
When Agassiz came into the laboratory, I was extracting and preserving
the embryos, being interested in embryology. He at once exclaimed that
he was delighted, and told me to put aside the skeletons and go right
on with collecting and preparing embryo birds, and making drawings,
etc. This I did all that season, obtaining about 2,000 embryos, mostly
of sea birds, for he sent me to Grand Manan Island, etc., for that
purpose. Before the end of the first year he gave me entire charge of
the birds and mammals in the Museum, as well as the coral collection,
which was large even then.

In the case of Hyatt, who went there just before I did, I think he was
kept working over a lot of mixed fish skeletons, more or less broken,
to 'see what he could make of them.' A little later he put Hyatt at
work on the Unionidae, studying the anatomy as well as the shells.
Within two years he put him on the Ammonites, a big collection having
been received from Europe at that time. Hyatt, however, had never done
anything in zoology or botany before he went to Agassiz and he found it
hard to get a beginning, and so lost time. I mention these cases to
show how different his methods were in different cases.