LOUIS AGASSIZ. [CHAP. xm. 



admiration ; the best proof of its great value being 

 the fact that now it commands more than double its 

 original price. 



Sad, but not unexpected, news awaited Agassiz on 

 his arrival at Cambridge, on the 28th of August. The 

 death of his wife, at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Grand Duchy 

 of Baden, had occurred on the 27th of July, 1848, two 

 days before her thirty-ninth birthday. She had learned, 

 with great relief of mind, the separation of Agassiz 

 from his secretary ; but she was too ill to hope for 

 recovery, for consumption had set in. After a long 

 struggle she died, surrounded by her three children, 

 in the house of her beloved brother Alexander Braun, 

 professor of botany at the University of Freiburg, 1 

 and was buried at the old cemetery of that town, closed 

 since 1867, and no longer used for burials. A simple 

 granite gravestone, with only her initial letters, C. A. 

 (Cecile Agassiz), engraved on it, marks her resting- 

 place ; no date, no sign, indicates that here reposes 



1 The accomplished daughter of Alexander Braun, Mrs. Cecile Met- 

 tenius, says in the life of her father : "After many days of suffering, dur- 

 ing which hopes of recovery mingled with presentiments of the approach 

 of death, Mrs. Agassiz died quietly, the zjlh of July, 1848. A few days 

 before her death, she received with joy a letter from her husband, to whom 

 she had sent the portraits of her children, drawn during her sickness." 

 It was a last tribute of love. Mrs. Mettenius adds: "She had had a life 

 full of struggles and of sorrows." Braun wrote to his brother (Max 

 Braun), announcing the sad news: "Our sister, who has had so many 

 afflictions, has found to-day her rest after her stormy life. She has suffered 

 much. Clod will give her in the other life what will change to joy all the 

 suffering of the life on earth; there she will understand the divine Provi- 

 dence which is full of charity, but whose ways are so obscure to us." 

 ("Alexander Braun's Leben," p. 405; Berlin, 1882.) 



