372 LOUIS AGASSIZ. 



bryonic growth to-day, and he often said, in 

 his lectures, " the history of the individual is 

 the history of the type." But the coincidence 

 between the geological succession, the embry- 

 onic development, the zoological gradation, 

 and the geographical distribution of annuals 

 in the past and the present, rested, according 

 to his belief, upon an intellectual coherence 

 and not upon a material connection. So, also, 

 the variability, as well as the constancy, of 

 organized beings, at once so plastic and so 

 inflexible, seemed to him controlled by some- 

 thing more than the mechanism of self-adjust- 

 ing forces. In this conviction he remained 

 unshaken all his life, although the develop- 

 ment theory came up for discussion under so 

 many various aspects during that time. His 

 views are now in the descending scale ; but to 

 give them less than their real prominence here 

 would be to deprive his scientific career of its 

 true basis. Belief in a Creator was the key- 

 note of his study of nature. 



In summing up the comprehensive results 

 of Agassiz's paleontological researches, and 

 especially of his " Fossil Fishes," Arnold 

 Guyot says : l 



" Whatever be the opinions which many 



1 See Biographical Memoir of Louis Agassiz, p. 28. 



