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EDITOR S INTRODUCTION 



In 1855, Louis Agassiz wrote a Swiss friend regarding his present 

 condition and future prospects: 



I have now been eight years in America, have learned the advantages of my 

 position here, and have begun undertakings which are not yet brought to a con- 

 clusion. I am also aware how wide an influence I already exert upon this land 

 of the future, an influence which gains in extent and intensity every year.i 



It was precisely this appreciation of his stature in American society 

 that prompted Agassiz to plan the publication of a series of mono- 

 graphs for the instruction of the public on the meaning of natural 

 history. During the next few years Agassiz worked intensely, aided 

 by the spiritual and monetary support that had always blessed his 

 popular efforts. In 1857 his labors were rewarded when Little, 

 Brown, and Company published the first two volumes of his Con- 

 tributions to the Natural History of the United States. The over- 

 sized, heavy, lavishly illustrated, finely printed volumes were in 

 themselves physical testimony to the dominance of their author in 

 national and international science and culture. The greater portion 

 of volume one was entitled Essay on Classification, in which Agassiz 

 delineated the theoretical principles and philosophy of his craft that 

 made comprehensible the subsequent special studies. The Essay was 

 the intellectual core of Agassiz's monumental publication, and he 

 was very proud of it. Its pages contained the fundamental truths that 

 had guided his long and distinguished examination of nature's crea- 

 tions. At a time when naturalists were debating divergent concep- 

 tions of the meaning of natural history he confidently expected his 

 treatise to be the full and final explanation of the organic world. 

 In 1859, at the behest of "friends in whose opinion I have the 



^Agassiz to Oswald Heer, January 9, 1855, Agassiz Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard 

 University. 



