In laying out the general plan, which was rarely absent from his thought, he distinguished between the demands which the specialist and the general observer might make upon an institution intended to instruct and benefit both. Here the special student should find in the laboratories and work rooms all the needed material for his investigations, stored in large collections, with duplicates enough to allow for that destruction of specimens which is necessarily involved in original research. The casual visitor meanwhile should walk through exhibition rooms, not simply crowded with objects to delight and interest him, but so arranged that the selection of every specimen should have reference to its part and place in nature; while the whole should be so combined as to explain, so far as known, the faunal and systematic relations of animals in the actual world, and in the geological formations; or, in other words, their succession in time, and their distribution in space. A favorite part of his plan was a room which he liked to call his synoptic room. Here was to be the most compact and yet the fullest statement in material form of the animal kingdom as a whole, an epitome of the creation, as it were. Of course the specimens must be few in so limited a space, but each one was to be characteristic of one or other of the various groups included under every large division. Thus each object would contribute to the explanation of the general plan. On the walls there were to be large, legible inscriptions, serving as a guide to the whole, and making this room a simple but comprehensive lesson in natural history. It was intended to be the entrance room for visitors, and to serve as an introduction to the more detailed presentation of the same vast subject, given by the faunal and systematic collections in the other exhibition rooms. The standard of work involved in this scheme is shown in many of his letters to his students and assistants, to whom he looked for aid in its execution. To one he writes: "You will get your synoptic series only after you have worked up in detail the systematic collection as a whole, the faunal collections in their totality, the geological sequence of the entire group under consideration, as well as its embryology and geographical distribution. Then alone will you be able to know the representatives in each series which will best throw light upon it and complete the other series." He did not live to fill in this comprehensive outline with the completeness which he intended, but all its details were fully explained by him before his death, and since that time have been carried out by his son, Alexander Agassiz. The synoptic room, and in great part the systematic and faunal collections, are now arranged and under exhibition, and the throngs of visitors during all the pleasant months of the year attest the interest they excite.