But Agassiz could not be long in any place without beginning to form a museum. When he accepted the chair offered him at Cambridge, there were neither collections nor laboratories belonging to his department. The specimens indispensable to his lectures were gathered almost by the day, and his outfit, with the exception of the illustrations he had brought from Europe, consisted of a blackboard and a lecture-room. There was no money for the necessary objects, and the want of it had to be supplied by the professor's own industry and resources. On the banks of the Charles River, just where it is crossed by Brighton Bridge, was an old wooden shanty set on piles; it might have served perhaps, at some time, as a bathing or a boat house. The use of this was allowed Agassiz for the storing of such collections as he had brought together. Pine shelves nailed against the walls served for cases, and with a table or two for dissection this rough shelter was made to do duty as a kind of laboratory. The fact is worth noting, for here was the beginning of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, now admitted to a place among the great institutions of its kind in the world. In the summer of 1848 Agassiz organized an expedition entirely after his own heart, inasmuch as it combined education with observation in the field. The younger portion of the party consisted of several of his special pupils, and a few other Harvard students who joined the expedition from general interest. Beside these, there were several volunteer members, who were either naturalists or had been attracted to the undertaking by their love of nature and travel. Their object was the examination of the eastern and northern shores of Lake Superior from Sault Ste. Marie to Fort William, a region then little known to science or to tourists. Agassiz taught along the road. At evening, around the camp-fire, or when delayed by weather or untoward circumstances, he would give to his companions short and informal lectures, it might be on the forest about them, or on the erratic phenomena in the immediate neighborhood,--on the terraces of the lake shore, or on the fish of its waters. His lecture-room, in short, was everywhere; his apparatus a traveling blackboard and a bit of chalk; while his illustrations and specimens lay all around him, wherever the party chanced to be.