LOUIS AGASSIZ. [CHAP. v. 



draw a line sharply separating his student life from his 

 life as privatdocent and instructor at the Munich Uni- 

 versity. His appetite, on the contrary, had greatly de- 

 veloped, and was almost beyond his control. However, 

 the society of de Charpentier at Bex and of Agassiz 

 at Bex and Neuchatel was beneficial to him ; and he 

 never was so brilliant and attractive. 



On the 1 5th of February, 1837, which was the anniver- 

 sary of his birth, Schimper was in particularly excellent 

 spirits. That evening he first made two verbal communi- 

 cations before the Natural History Society on botanic 

 morphology, promising to write them for the "Bulletin," 

 a promise which, by the way, was never carried 

 into effect, like all Schimper's promises,- -and then he 

 distributed to Agassiz and all the friends there a small 

 piece of poetry, half-scientific, half-humorous, in which, 

 for the first time, the word Eiszeit (glacial epoch), so 

 celebrated since, was printed. Schimper had the honour 

 to be the god-father of a great geologic period, for it 

 was certainly he who first coined and used the word. 

 Agassiz always acknowledged his priority ; and on the 

 25th of July, before the geological section of the Hel- 

 vetic Society, he read a letter from Schimper, addressed 

 to him under the title of " Ueber die Eiszeit," in which 

 the word Eiszeit is written in italics, and so printed on 

 p. 38 of the " Actes de la Societe Helvetique," Neuchatel, 



1837- 



But poor Schimper soon fell again into bad habits 



after leaving Agassiz, and the brilliant spirit, the rare 

 genius, - - for a man of genius Schimper certainly was, 

 became more and more obscured, until he disap- 



