18733 Agassiz s Lectures 



Of all his varied lectures the most instructive 

 were those on glaciers. Here he spoke as an expert, 

 and every rock around was witness to his words. 

 Equally delightful, however, were the reminiscences 

 of his early life and of his fellow workers in science, 

 Schimper and Braun in Munich, Valenciennes and 

 the rest in Paris, and the three he acknowledged as 

 masters — Cuvier, Humboldt, and Dollinger. "I 

 lived at Munich for three years under Dr. Dollinger's 

 roof," he said, "and my scientific training goes back 

 to him, and to him alone." 



To the Darwinian theory as it looked to him he Not a 

 was most earnestly opposed. Essentially an idealist, Darwinian 

 he regarded all his own investigations not as studies 

 of animals and plants as such, but as glimpses into 

 the divine plans of which their structures are the 

 expression. "That earthly form is the cover of the 

 spirit was to him a truth at once fundamental and 

 self-evident." To his mind, also, divine ideas were 

 especially embodied in animal life, the species being 

 the "thought unit." The marvel of structural 

 affinity — unity of plan — in creatures of widely 

 diverse habits and outward appearance he took to 

 be simply a result of the association of ideas in the 

 divine mind. To Darwin, on the other hand, those 

 relations illustrated the tie of a common heredity 

 acting under diverse conditions of environment. 



Yet Agassiz had no sympathy with the prejudices 

 exploited by weak and foolish men in opposition to 

 Darwin's views. He believed in the absolute freedom 

 of science, and that no authority whatever can 

 answer beforehand the questions we endeavor to 

 solve — an attitude strikingly evidenced by the 

 fact that every one especially trained by him after- 



