100 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



land of his adoption. Consequently, I have no hesitation in 

 claiming him also as a pioneer of oceanography. 



It has been said of the two Agassizs that the father and 

 son were very unlike in character and essential nature, and 

 that is no doubt true to some extent. Louis was an enthu- 

 siast and was pre-eminently a great teacher and public 

 expositor. Alexander was a quiet, reserved man, the 

 typical student and investigator, who did not care for teach- 

 ing and avoided publicity. But still, in considering their 

 lives and the work they did, it is possible to trace some 

 common characteristics. Both were great collectors all 

 their lives, and between them they built up at Harvard a 

 notable museum of an original character. Both also were 

 indefatigable in seeking out the truths of nature, in accumu- 

 lating facts rather than in spinning theories. Louis, in 

 speaking of Oken and the nature-philosophers of his student 

 days in Germany, who were " constructing the universe out 

 of their own brains," said, " He is the truest student of 

 nature who, while seeking the solution of these great pro- 

 blems, admits that the only true scientific system must be 

 one in which the thought, the intellectual structure, rises out 

 of and is based upon facts " ; while Alexander, half a century 

 later, speaking of theories of coral reefs, said, " I am glad 

 that I always stuck to writing what I saw in each group and 

 explaining what I saw as best I could, without trying all the 

 time to have an all-embracing theory " ; and Murray, in the 

 same connection, remarks of him, '' He professed never to 

 engage in discussions except where it was possible to verify 

 one's conclusions by an appeal to observation or experi- 

 ment." Thus we see the same dependence upon facts and 

 avoidance of theories in both men. 



Louis Agassiz, a Swiss, was born in 1807 in a small village, 

 near Neuchatel, in the Canton de Vaud. His education 

 consisted first of a school at Lausanne, then at the Medical 

 School of Zurich, and finally the universities of Heidelberg 

 and Munich, where, like Edward Forbes at Edinburgh, he 



