PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA 305 



Louis Agassiz 1 



By the Rev. EDWARD EVERETT HALE 

 BOSTON, MASS. 



I think that the first time when I ever saw Agassiz was at one of 

 his own lectures early in his American life. This was a description 

 of his ascent of the Jungfrau. I think it was wholly extempore and 

 though he was new in his knowledge of English, it was idiomatic and 

 thoroughly intelligible. At the end, as he described the last climb, 

 hand and foot, by which as it seems, men come to the little triangular 

 plane, only three feet across, which makes the summit, he quickened 

 our enthusiasm by describing the physical struggle by which he lifted 

 himself so that he could stand on this little three-foot table: He said, 

 ' one by one we stood there, and looked down into Swisserland.' He 

 bowed and retired. 



I know I said at once that Mr. Lowell, of our Lowell Institute, 

 who had * imported Agassiz' (that is James Lowell's phrase), might 

 have said before the audience left the hall, ' You will see, ladies and 

 gentlemen, that we are able to present to you the finest specimen yet 

 discovered of the genus homo of the species intelligens.' 



And looking back half a century, on those very first years of his 

 life in America, I think it is fair to say that wherever he went he 

 awakened that sort of personal enthusiasm. And he went everywhere. 

 He was made a professor in Harvard College in 1848. But he never 

 thought of confining himself to any conventional theory of a college 

 professor's work. He was not in the least afraid of making science 

 popular. He flung himself into any or every enterprise by which he 

 could quicken the life of the common schools, and in forty different 

 ways he created a new class of men and women. Naturalists showed 

 themselves on the right hand and on the left. I have seen him address 

 an audience of five hundred people, not twenty of whom when they 

 entered the hall thought they had anything to do with the study of 

 nature. And when after his address they left the hall, all of the five 

 hundred were determined to keep their eyes open and to study nature 

 as she is. From that year 1848, you may trace a steady advance in 

 nature study in the New England schools. 



That is to say, that his distinction is that of an educator quite as 

 much as it is that of a naturalist. In 1888, Lowell said, in his quarter- 

 millenial address at Harvard College, that the college trained no great 

 educator, ' for we imported Agassiz.' A great educator he truly was. 



When Agassiz was appointed professor he was forty-one years old. 

 In my first personal conversation with him he told me a story, which 



1 A letter read by Professor A. E. Verrill, of Yale University. Interesting 

 remarks were also made by Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Washington, D. C. 

 vol. lxx. — 19. 



