work in its historical context. From 1871 to 1874, Morse was appointed to the chair of comparative anatomy and zoology at Bowdoin College. In 1873 and 1874 he was a teacher at the summer school established by Agassiz on Penikese Island. Though the school only operated for a few years, several of its students went on to distinguished careers, including David Starr Jordan. In 1874, he became a lecturer at Harvard University. In 1876, Morse was named a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1877, he provided the illustrations for a book by his friend John Mead Gould, entitled How to camp out. During this period the issue of evolution caused much discussion and controversy. Agassiz was an opponent of evolution. He argued that the persistence of animals such as Lingula (a brachiopod) over immense periods of time, from the Silurian to the present day, with little change was "a fatal objection to the theory of gradual development". However all of his students subsequently adopted evolutionary theory in various forms. A clear statement of Morse's position on evolution is found in his address, as vice-president (Natural History) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its Buffalo NY meeting in August 1876 (reprinted under the title of What American Zoologists have done for Evolution) He adopts a clear selectionist position, in contrast, for example, to Hyatt, who was a neo-Lamarckian. He addresses the issue of human origins, and finds the evidence for "the lowly origin of man", and common ancestry with apes, convincing. He did not only express these views in a western context, but was subsequently the first to bring Darwin's theory of evolution to Japan. Japan In June 1877 Morse first visited Japan in search of coastal brachiopods. His visit turned into a three-year stay when he was offered a post as the first professor of Zoology at the Tokyo Imperial University. He went on to recommend several fellow Americans as o-yatoi gaikokujin (foreign advisors) to support the modernization of Japan in the Meiji Era. To collect specimens, he established a marine biological laboratory at Enoshima in Kanagawa Prefecture. While looking out of a window on a train between Yokohama and Tokyo, Morse discovered the Ōmori shell mound, the excavation of which opened the study in archaeology and anthropology in Japan and shed much light on the material culture of prehistoric Japan. He returned