I832-35-] BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT DUBLIN. 65 



felt ; for he alone would have had the power to get a 

 subscription for fifty or sixty copies from the govern- 

 ment, as he did for his " Poissons vivants," which would 

 have placed Agassiz at ease. Properly engineered, 

 Agassiz might have succeeded in getting the French 

 government interested in his great work, but for some 

 reason he withdrew from the undertaking, and did not 

 even make an attempt in that direction during his stay 

 in Paris. 



An incident occurred at Dublin, during the meeting 

 of the British Association, which was recorded in a 

 letter from Adam Sedgwick to Lyell, dated Sept. 20, 

 1835. Sedgwick says: " Agassiz joined us at Dub- 

 lin, and read a long paper to our section (the Geo- 

 logical Section). But what think you ? Instead of 

 teaching us what we wanted to know, and giving us of 

 the overflowing of his abundant ichthyological wealth, 

 he read a long, stupid, hypothetical dissertation on 

 geology, drawn from the depths of his ignorance. And, 

 among other marvels, he told us that each formation 

 (e.g., the lias and the chalk) was formed at one moment 

 by a catastrophe, and that the fossils were by such 

 catastrophes brought from some unknown region, and 

 deposited where we find them. When he sat down, I 

 brought him up again, by some specific questions about 

 his ichthyological system, and then he both instructed 

 and amused us. I hope we shall, before long, be able 

 to get this moonshine out of his he*ad, or at least pre- 

 vent him from publishing it. His great work is going 

 on admirably well. I think it is by far the most impor- 



