Two years later he was called to
the chair of natural philosophy at Princeton University, where he
continued his investigations, many of which have been of permanent value
to science. In 1846, he was elected first secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution, and removed to Washington, where the last forty years of
his life were passed in the development of the great scientific
establishment of which he was the head. He steadily refused the most
flattering offers of other positions, among them the presidency of
Princeton, and like Agassiz, he might have answered, when tempted by
larger salaries, "I cannot afford to waste my time in making money." To
his efforts is largely due the establishment of the national lighthouse
system, as well as that of the national weather bureau.

Besides his services to American science as instructor at Harvard
College, Louis Agassiz rendered another when he persuaded Arnold Guyot,
his colleague in the college at Neuchatel, to accompany him to this
country. Guyot was at that time forty years old, and was already widely
known as a geologist and naturalist, and the delivery of a series of
lectures before the Lowell Institute, established his reputation in this
country. He was soon invited to the chair of physical geography and
geology at Princeton, which he held until his death. He founded the
museum at Princeton, which has since become one of the best of its kind
in the United States. Perhaps he is best known for the series of
geographies he prepared, and which were at one time widely used in
schools throughout the United States.

Perhaps no family has been more closely associated with American science
than that of the Huguenot Le Conte, who settled at New Rochelle, New
York, about the close of the seventeenth century, moving afterwards to
New Jersey. There, in 1782, Lewis Le Conte was born. He was graduated at
Columbia at the age of seventeen and started to study medicine, but was
soon afterwards called to the management of the family estates of
Woodsmanston, in Georgia. There he established a botanical garden and a
laboratory in which he tested the discoveries of the chemists of the
day. His death resulted from poison that was taken into his system while
dressing a wound for a member of his family.

His son, John Le Conte, after studying medicine and beginning the
practice of his profession at Savannah, Georgia, was called to the chair
of natural philosophy and chemistry at Franklin College