Luckily for us, the famous poet John Greenleaf Whittier was also in attendance that summer and he did not agree with David’s assessment. Whittier would later publish a poem called “The Prayer of Agassiz” recounting that very speech. He starts with a bit of scene setting—“On the isle of Penikese / Ringed about by sapphire seas”—and then gets to it, to Agassiz’s main point, the reason collecting mattered.
