Education
He later attended prep school in New London, New Hampshire, then went on to Dartmouth College, where his favorite subjects were chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. His love of natural history was noted by the Dartmouth faculty, who gave him a letter of introduction to study under the well-known Harvard professor Louis Agassiz. After graduating with the class of 1860, he went on to become one of Agassiz's handful of special students. He also worked in Agassiz's Museum of Comparative Zoology, which helped him pay his way through a four-year course of study. It was during this time that Bickmore began to visualize founding a Museum of Natural History in New York City, as the European museums of natural history were in political and monetary capitals, and New York was a logical American parallel city. When the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) visited Cambridge MA in 1861, Henry Acland of the University of Oxford joined him. Bickmore was privileged to discuss his plans for a museum with Dr. Acland, whose encouragement strengthened his determination to found such a museum. Others had previously failed to generate the necessary funds to establish a museum.
Read more about this topic: Albert S. Bickmore
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
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