98 LOUIS AGASSIZ. [CHAP. xvn. 



once to a high degree, but his best teaching was not 

 clone in this way. It was too theatrical. Agassiz 

 was at his best when he was looking at specimens, 

 detailing the differences, dwelling strongly on charac- 

 ters which would have escaped other eyes than his own. 

 His unusually keen sight and his rare memory were his 

 great attractions, and he displayed them to the best 

 advantage, on the spur of the moment, when there 

 were only one or two hearers. Then Agassiz was 

 natural, without thought of effect ; and he was a won- 

 derful and rare naturalist and incomparable teacher. 

 Like many men of genius, he would seek for admira- 

 tion and applause, even in dealing with questions, or 

 more correctly with branches, of science, upon which 

 he was not well informed. Trusting to his great abil- 

 ity and immense experience in lecturing, he would go 

 deeply into a subject, not only foreign to his usual 

 researches, but which he had really no inclination to 

 investigate fairly ; like the great French painter Ingres, 

 who preferred the approval given to his rather indiffer- 

 ent performance on the violin to that accorded his great 

 and splendid pictures. 



Agassiz was not a practical geologist ; and when in 

 the field, he showed an almost complete absence of 

 the intuition requisite, indeed absolutely necessary, to 

 master the stratigraphy, the classification, and the orog- 

 raphy of any portion of the earth's surface excepting 

 in regard to glacial questions, on which he was a great 

 master. In his lectures he liked to go into historical 

 geology, in which branch his knowledge was absolutely 

 defective. So long as he kept to generalities, he did 



