512 ZOOLOGY 



fore, accept these accumulated materials to use in any 

 manner he thought best ? Agassiz, communicating the 

 news to his grandfather, writes: "You can imagine 

 what new ardor this has given me for my work ; . . . I 

 work regularly at least fifteen hours a day, sometimes 

 even an hour or two more ; but I hope to reach my 

 goal in good time." Even after this, Agassiz was 

 almost compelled to abandon his labors and return 

 prematurely to Switzerland, on account of lack of 

 means. Fortunately another great scientific man, 

 Alexander von Humboldt, learned of his distress and 

 generously supplied him with a considerable sum of 

 money. 



Return to 6. Agassiz went to Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 1832, 



Switzerland anc j rema i nec i unt ii ^45. During this time he taught 



and wrote, and although he had great difficulty in 

 making a living, this was the period of his most brilliant 

 and important scientific work. In 1833 he married 

 Cecile Braun, the sister of his greatest friend. From 

 1833 to 1844 the great work on Fossil Fishes (Recherches 

 sur les Poissons fossiles) appeared in parts, with hun- 

 dreds of plates. Agassiz had developed a classifica- 

 tion which depended largely on the character of the 

 scales, but it subsequently appeared that some of his 

 groups were unnatural, and his methods were aban- 

 doned. In quite recent years the scale work has been 

 taken up again, and the result has been to confirm 

 fully the value of scales for classification, though the 

 interpretations of Agassiz prove in some cases unsound. 

 Much work was done on fresh-water fishes also, on 

 fossil echinoderms, and other subjects, the titles of 

 books and papers issued during the Neuchatel period 

 numbering about 1 50. The most remarkable new work, 

 however, was on a subject wholly unconnected with 



