OP ARTS AND SCIENCES. 313 



aud power, he proceeded to surround himself with tlie appliances of a 

 great scientific centre, and to enter on a series of original investiga- 

 tions which might well have taxed the powers of half a dozen able 

 men. He had constantly employed two artists, Weber and Dinkel, and 

 a painter, Jacques Burkhardt, who had been his fellow-student at 

 Munich, and who remained his life-long companion. Stahl, since 

 noted as the best modeller at the Garden of Plants, was then employed 

 at Neuchatel. Hercule Nicolet, summoiaed from Paris, was persuaded 

 to set u}), in this new home of science, a large lithographic establish- 

 ment, where were published the last plates of the Poissons fussiles ; 

 those of the Poissons d ^Eau douce ; of the embryology of Coregonus ; 

 of the works on the Glaciers ; and of the Echinoderms. That " Little 

 Academy " of Munich now took on a new shape, and reappeared as La 

 Societe des Sciences Naturelles de Neuchatel. Its first meeting was in 

 December, 1832, when Louis Coulon was chosen president, and Louis 

 Agassiz secretary of the section of Natural History. It is needless to 

 add that the section of Natural History was the important one in 

 the society, and its secretary the important man of the section. 

 The next fourteen years, during which he held the chair in Neuchatel, 

 were especially his years of research and publication ; and it is hardly 

 conceivable that one man, even with able assistants, could within that 

 period have done such an enormous amount of work. Thus far his 

 attention had been directed chiefly to the class of fishes in which Mar- 

 tins had interested him. Their study had led him into paleontology^ 

 because of the great quantity of fossil species which had hitherto been 

 the despair of ichthyologists. Fishes whose skeletons were soft, and 

 which had thick muscles, were so crushed and distorted as to be un- 

 recognizable, and the viscera were almost never to be distinguished. 

 In the course of an exhaustive study of their anatomy, Agassiz dis- 

 covered that the scales of fishes correspond by four kinds of structure 

 to four grand natural divisions, which he called Ganoids, Placoids, 

 Cycloids, and Ctenoids. With this basis, and aided by an intimate 

 knowledge of the skeleton, he was enabled to tabulate all the known 

 fossil species, to the number of a thousand ; and these he published as 

 Recherches sur les Poissons fossiles, in five volumes, with about four 

 hundred plates of unusual excellence. This woi"k, which was ten 

 years in going through the press, was in itself enough to properly 

 occupy a lifetime, and to give a reputation of the first class. In later 

 years the author came to know that a classification founded on the 

 scales alone was not without many exceptions, but it may well be 

 doubted if any other classification has been discovered which comes so 

 VOL. 1. .40 



