TRIBUTE TO MRS. AGASSIZ

A memorial service to Mrs. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the first president of Radcliffe College, was held yesterday afternoon in Agassiz House. President Briggs presided and the speakers were President Eliot, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Professor W. W. Goodwin, and Miss Georgina Schuyler, who was a pupil in the school which Mrs. Agassiz conducted in Cambridge from 1855 to 1863.

President Eliot, in his brief address, described the hearing before the Massachusetts Legislative Committee on Education, in 1894, when Radcliffe College received the charter under which it is now conducted. The committee, and a large body of citizens who had gathered for the public hearing on the question, were hostile to the plan proposed in the petition. Either of two plans would have been acceptable to the committee; that Radcliffe should be an institution entirely separate from Harvard University, or that Harvard should become a co-educational university, admitting women on the same basis as men. The plan advocated by Mrs. Agassiz, President Eliot, and other interested in the welfare of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, as it was then called, was that on which Radcliffe is at present conducted, of affiliation with Harvard in the advanced courses and complete separation in the more elementary instruction.

At this hearing the lawyers who presented the petition for the charter, President Eliot, and other gentlemen who spoke in favor of it, made no effect on the bostile committee of the legislature. Then Mrs. Agassiz arose to plead her own cause. Her address was a notable example of the effectiveness of public speaking; at its close the committee

were doubtful of their position, and Mrs. Agassiz's clear answers to the questions which they then put to her completely changed their attitude. The lawyers who had been engaged by the opponents of the charter made no defence when they were called on, and the case of the petitioners was won.

After the hearing the affairs of the college went smoothly. On the recommendation of the committee the charter was granted by the legislature. Mrs. Agassiz became the first president of the new college, as she had been of the preceding society, and for several years a was a strong influence in building it up to its present high position. Personally she was refined, high-brad, even aristocratic; but no woman of her generation was more influential through the sneer force of personality