Agassiz's report to the Coast Survey upon the results of this first
investigation made by him upon the reefs of Florida was not
published in full at the time. The parts practically most important
to the Coast Survey were incorporated in their subsequent charts;
the more general scientific results, as touching the physical
history of the peninsula as a whole, appeared in various forms,
were embodied in Agassiz's lectures, and were printed some years
after in his volume entitled "Methods of Study." The original
report, with all the plates prepared for it, was published in the
"Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology," under the
supervision of Alexander Agassiz, after the death of his father. It
forms a quarto volume, containing some sixty pages of text, with
twenty-two plates, illustrative of corals and coral structure, and
a map of Southern Florida with its reefs and keys.
This expedition was also of great importance to Agassiz's
collections, and to the embryo museum in Cambridge. It laid the
foundation of a very complete collection of corals of all varieties
and in all stages of growth. All the specimens, from huge coral
heads and branching fans down to the most minute single corals,
were given up to him, the value of the whole being greatly enhanced
by the drawings taken on the spot from the living animals.
To this period belongs also the following fragment of a letter to
Humboldt.
TO ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.
[Probably 1852,--date not given.]
. . .What a time has passed since my last letter! Had you not been
constantly in my thoughts, and your counsels always before me as my
guide, I should reproach myself for my silence. I hope my two
papers on the medusae, forwarded this year, have reached you, and
also one upon the classification of insects, as based upon their
development. I have devoted myself especially to the organization
of the invertebrate animals, and to the facts bearing upon the
perfecting of their classification. I have succeeded in tracing the
same identity of structure between the three classes of radiates,
and also between those of mollusks, as has already been recognized
in the vertebrates, and partially in the articulates. It is truly a
pleasure for me now to be able to demonstrate in my lectures the
insensible gradations existing between polyps, medusae, and
echinoderms, and to designate by the same name organs seemingly so
different. Especially has the minute examination of the thickness
of the test in echinoderms revealed to me unexpected relations
between the sea-urchin and the medusa. No one suspects, I fancy, at
this moment, that the solid envelope of the Scutellae and the
Clypeasters is traversed by a net-work of radiating tubes,
corresponding to those of the medusae, so well presented by
Ehrenberg in Aurelia aurita. If the Berlin zoologists will take the
trouble to file off the surface of the test of an Echinarachnius
parma, they will find a circular canal as large and as continuous
as that of the medusae.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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