flung himself into any and every enterprise by which he could quicken 
the life of the common schools, and in forty different ways he created 
a new class of men and women. Naturalists showed themselves on 
the right hand and on the left. I have seen him address an audience 
of five hundred people, not twenty of whom when they entered the hall 
thought they had anything to do with the study of Nature. And when 
after his address they left the hall, all of the five hundred were deter- 
mined to keep their eyes open and to study Nature as she is. From 
that year 1848, you may trace a steady advance in Nature Study in the 
New England schools. 
That is to say, that his distinction is that of an educator quite as 
much as it is that of a naturalist. In 1888, Lowell said, in his quater- 
millennial address at Harvard College, that the College had trained no 
great educator, “for we imported Agassiz.” A great educator he 
truly was. 
When Agassiz was appointed Professor he was forty-one years old. 
In my first personal conversation with him he told me a story which 
may not have got into print, of his own physical strength. He spoke 
as if it were then an old experience to him. Whether he were twenty- 
five or thirty-five when it happened, it shows how admirable was his 
training and his physical constitution. He had been with a party of 
friends somewhere in eastern Switzerland. ‘They were travelling in 
their carriages; he was on foot. ‘They parted with the understanding 
that they were to meet in the Tyrol, at the city of Innsbruck. Accord- 
ingly the next morning, Agassiz rose early and started through the 
mountains by this valley and that, as the compass might direct or his 
previous knowledge of the region. He did not mean to stop for study 
and they did not. But he had no special plan as to which hamlet or 
cottage should cover him at night. Before sundown he came in sight of 
a larger town than he expected to see, in the distance, and calling a 
mountaineer, he asked him what that place was. ‘The man said it was 
Innsbruck. Agassiz said that that could not be so. The man replied 
with a jeer that he had lived there twenty years, and had always been 
told that that was the name of the place, but he supposed Agassiz knew 
better than he did. Accordingly Agassiz determined that he would 
sleep there and did so. The distance was somewhere near seventy 
miles. I know it gave me the impression of a walk through the valley 
passes at the rate of four miles an hour, for sixteen or seventeen hours. 
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