1912^ Zoology in America 59 



Agassiz, to this conntry. He came primarily to deliver some 

 lectures in Boston. Agassiz's personality captivated the coun- 

 try and, although he freely criticised it, the country evidently 

 captivated him, for he remained here until his death in 1873, 

 refusing offers, of the most attractive kind, of posts in European 

 institutions. Agassiz himself was a systematic zoologist, a 

 describer and classifier of high rank, but he was much more. 

 He brought with him a practical familiarity with the problems 

 and points of view of morphological zoology which had been 

 engaging the attention of the great European naturalists for 

 decades. His mind and methods were comparative, and he 

 emphasized the importance of looking not so much at species, 

 as at the fundamental points of structure in the anatomy of 

 groups, the changes of form undergone during embryonic devel- 

 opment, and the structure of extinct forms. Moreover, he laid 

 stress on the importance of looking at these three sets of phe- 

 nomena together. He maintained more definitely than any of 

 his predecessors that the embryo passes through a series of 

 changes during which it resembles successively the lower mem- 

 bers of the great group or type to which it belongs ; and that 

 the fossils in any group as we proceed from the oldest to the 

 more recent, show a similar progress from simplicity to com- 

 plexity of structure. How like an argument for evolution all 

 this sounds ! But Louis Agassiz to the last held out against 

 evolution, and refused to see that the parallelisms or funda- 

 mental similarities between the series of fossils, of existing 

 forms, and of embryonic stages, were to be explained as the 

 result of kinship. Following Cuvier he looked on the history 

 of the world as divisible into a series of distinct epochs, each 

 of which was inaugurated by a special act of creation. The 

 several epochs "uath their living organisms were brought to a 

 close by tremendous, supernaturally induced disasters styled 

 cataclysms. Between the species of two epochs there could be, 

 he maintained, no kinship, no material or genetic connection. 

 Whatever resemblances existed between species were, to his 

 mind, purely ideal and due to the fact that organisms represent 

 the embodied thoughts of a superior power. This way of look- 



