184 LOUIS AGASSIZ. [CHAP. xxii. 



tailed. The Hasslcr was able merely to creep along 

 the coast from one port to another, stopping at almost 

 every one to allow her machinery to be repaired. She 

 sailed from the Barbadoes to Pernambuco, thence to 

 Rio Janeiro, Montevideo, Port of San Antonio, Strait 

 of Magellan, Arenas, Port Famine, Glacier Bay, Sholl 

 Bay, San Pedro, and finally to Talcahuana in Concep- 

 tion Bay, Chili, where she remained three weeks for 

 the repair of her engine. Pourtales dredged as often 

 as practicable, and succeeded in collecting a large num- 

 ber of rare or unknown species. 



Before embarking, December 2, Agassiz wrote " A 

 Letter concerning Deep-Sea Dredgings, addressed to 

 Professor Benjamin Pierce, Superintendent United 

 States Coast Survey," 1 in which he says:- 



On the point of starting for the Deep-Sea Dredging Expedition, 

 for which you have so fully provided, and which I trust may prove 

 to be one of the best rewards for your devotion to the interests of 

 the Coast Survey, 1 am desirous to leave in your hands a document 

 which may be very compromising lor me, but which I nevertheless 

 am determined to write, in the hope of showing within what limits 

 natural history has advanced toward that point of maturity when 

 science may anticipate the discovery of facts. 



If there is, as I believe to be the case, a plan according to which 

 the affinities among animals and the order of their succession in 

 time were determined from the beginning, and if that plan is re- 

 flected in the mode of growth, and in the geographical distribution 

 of all living beings ; or, in other words, if this world of ours is the 

 work of intelligence, and not merely the product of force and mat- 

 ter, the human mind, as a part of the whole, should so chime with 

 it that, from what is known, it may reach the unknown ; and if this 

 be so, the amount of information thus far gathered should, within 



1 " Bulletin Mus. Comp. Zotilogy," Vol. 111., Cambridge, 1871. 



