1807-27.] STAY AT ORBE. 19 



growing in the Jura Vaudois. I do not know that it 

 was ever published. I was led to think that it was, 

 when Agassiz, speaking many years after of the Suchet 

 Mountain, which he remembered with the freshness of 

 a young man who has just visited them, said to me, 

 " Do you know, it was the first work I did in natural 

 history an entirely botanical one." I have been un- 

 able to discover the work, however, and no one of his 

 Swiss family has ever heard of it. It is only just to say 

 that he was much helped in his botanical explorations 

 round Orbe by the " suffragan," or assistant pastor of 

 his father, Marc Louis Fivaz, like Agassiz an enthusiast 

 in natural history. Fivaz soon abandoned all his re- 

 searches in natural history, however, although he held 

 the professorship of botany at the Academy of Lau- 

 sanne, and became a voluntary evangelist in the interior 

 of the west of New York, where he lived, in Tioga 

 County, until his death. 



This summer of 1827, when he had just attained his 

 twentieth year, gave Agassiz his first real opportunity to 

 work as a naturalist ; and, as was always his custom in 

 later life, he induced those around him to help him in 

 collecting specimens and in making drawings. Besides 

 his friend Marc Fivaz, who accompanied him in all his 

 excursions, he put his younger sister, Cecile, to work 

 drawing fishes and butterflies. His first two artists of 

 natural history specimens, therefore, were two Ceciles, 

 the first, Miss Cecilia Braun, and the second, Miss 

 Cecile Agassiz, his own sister, and the sister of his 

 friend Braun. 



