224 LOUIS Au.ISSM [CHAP. 



Mrs. Agassiz says : " The ability, so eminently pos- 

 sessed by Agassiz, of dealing with a number of sub- 

 jects at once, was due to no superficial versatility. To 

 him his work had but one meaning. It was never dis- 

 connected in his thought, and therefore he turned from 

 his glaciers to his fossils, and from the fossils to the liv- 

 ing world, with the feeling that he was always dealing 

 with kindred problems, bound together by the same 

 laws." 1 And she adds that Agassiz followed all his 

 life a unity of plan in his scientific researches. 



Professor Karl Vogt, 2 of Geneva, who was associated 

 with Agassiz for five years of the most active and sci- 

 entifically productive part of his life, says : " I never 

 met with another man gifted with such remarkable 

 talent in the zoological domain. Agassiz, better than 

 anybody else, made discoveries in collecting materials 

 and looking rapidly over collections ; but after a first 

 hasty examination and classification, and when it was 

 time to study methodically the specimens, then he 

 escaped and shut himself up like the folding of the 

 blades of a pocket-knife, and it was most difficult to 

 bring him back to the work only sketched out. . . . 

 He was wanting in character, being like a piece of 

 wax, which retains the mark of the last hand that has 

 held it, and like a weathercock, which turns all around 



1 " Louis Agassiz," by Mrs. E. C. Agassiz, Vol. I., p. 336. 



2 Karl, or Carl, or Charles Vogt, born at Giessen, the 5th July, iSi-, 

 died at Geneva, the 5th May, 1895. He was the last surviving member 

 of the scientific household of Agassiz at Neuchatel. Dr. Charles I 

 Girard, another assistant, preceded him by only a few months, having diol 

 on the 29th of January, 1895, at Levallois-l'eiret, a suburb of Paris, at tin- 

 age of seventy-two. 



