AGASSIZ AT NEUCHATEL 



old age the delight of his life. Teaching was a 

 passion with him, and his power over his pupils 

 might be measured by his own enthusiasm. 

 He was intellectually, as well as socially, a 

 democrat, in the best sense. He delighted to 

 scatter broadcast the highest results of thought 

 and research, and to adapt them even to the 

 youngest and most uninformed minds. In his 

 later American travels he would talk of glacial 

 phenomena to the driver of a country stage- 

 coach among the mountains, or to some work- 

 man, splitting rock at the road-side, with as 

 much earnestness as if he had been discussing 

 problems with a brother geologist; he would 

 take the common fisherman into his scientific 

 confidence, telling him the intimate secrets of 

 fish-structure or fish-embryology, till the man 

 in his turn became enthusiastic, and began to 

 pour out information from the stores of his 

 own rough and untaught habits of observation. 

 Agassiz's general faith in the susceptibility of 

 the popular intelligence, however untrained, to 

 the highest truths of nature, was contagious, 

 and he created or developed that in which he 

 believed. . . . 



