xxxviii Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 



cantonal government administered under the regime of Prussia, 

 he found conditions both congenial and favorable for his work. 

 His official position, enhanced later by the establishment of the 

 Academic de Neuchdtel, was of modest rank, except as he raised 

 it to importance through his individual reputation. In the 

 spring of 1840, aided b,y an appropriation of money from the 

 royal purse, he left Neuchatel for Boston, visiting Paris on the 

 way. The journey was projected as one of exploration and col- 

 lecting; it proved to be a translation to a new home. 



In the first years at Neuchatel Agassiz accomplished an enor- 

 mous amount of scientific work covering a very wide range of 

 research. Simultaneously with his engrossing work on the 

 "Fossil Fishes," he kept up his studies of living fishes, and con- 

 ducted investigations of the highest importance in other depart- 

 ments of zoology and palaeontology" and in geology. Of the 

 importance and extent of his published work down to 1837, one 

 of his later biographers* has written, from competent knowl- 

 edge: — "There is no other example of such a rapid rise to great 

 scientific reputation as Agassiz enjoyed in his thirtieth year. 

 At the age of twenty-one, when he was still a student, he laid 

 the foundation by his publication, in 1828, of Spix's Brazilian 

 fishes ; and the first numbers or ' livraisons ' of his ' Fossil Fishes ' 

 [issue begun in 1833] attracted the attention of naturalists the 

 world over. Everything he published ... is remarkable, show- 

 ing a rare power of description and classification, and facility 

 in handhng the most difficult problem in natural history. . . . 

 His power of classifying fossils and his success in reducing to 

 order thousands of specimens of fishes, a great many of which 

 were perfect puzzles to everyone, were simply marvellous; and 

 he worked at his herculean task as no man but a man of genius 

 could have done." In a later chapterf the same biographer 

 writes: — "The result of his fourteen years' residence at Neu- 

 chatel was the publication of more than twenty volumes, with 

 two thousand folio or octavo plates, and many separate papers ; 

 all were well written, beautifully printed, and profusely illustrated 

 with most exact drawings — a record so creditable that it gave a 

 just celebrity, not only to Agassiz, but also to Neuchatel, a small 

 town of less than six thousand inhabitants. The " Neuchatelois" 



* Jules Marcou: "Life, Letters, and Workji of Louis Agassiz." New York, 

 1896. vol. i, p. 113. 

 t Ibid. vol. i, p. 245. 



