1868-yo.] LETTER TO J. MARCOU. 167 



This letter is doubly interesting- : first, because it 

 shows that the great and wonderful memory of Agassiz 

 was on the decline, for he had forgotten his preceding 

 letter in regard to the state of his health ; second, be- 

 cause it expresses his feeling about the glacial question 

 and the studied neglect of some, who affected to pass 

 over the great part he had taken in it, from the start. 



In 1868, a short journey to the Rocky Mountains 

 was made on the invitation of Mr. Samuel Hooper, 

 then member of Congress for Massachusetts, to see 

 the progress made in the construction of the Union 

 Pacific Railroad. General Sherman, commander-in-chief 

 of the army, joined the party with ambulances and an 

 escort of cavalry for conveyance across a part of the 

 Kansas and Nebraska prairies. The road was built 

 only as far as the Green River station, in Wyoming, 

 where the laying of rails had brought to view a bed of 

 limestone full of fossil fishes and insects. Agassiz was 

 delighted by the discovery, and, if he had been fifteen 

 years younger, he would never have stopped at Green 

 River station and thence turned eastward without a 

 visit, strongly urged upon him by Judge Carter, of Fort 

 Bridger, to the Grizzly Bear Buttes, so celebrated since 

 as the richest locality for fossil vertebrates of the Oligo- 

 cene period. Judge Carter, the sutler at Fort Bridger, 

 met the party at Green River, and related to Agassiz, 

 how an old trapper, Jack Robinson, had repeatedly 

 reported to him that he knew several places, at the 

 foot of the Uintah Mountains, where grizzly bears 

 were changed into stone, the bones being as hard and 

 heavy as rocks ; and, in order to convince Judge Carter, 



