LOl IS JOHN RUDOLPH AGASSIZ. L03 



Dinkel, and a painter, Jacques Burckhardt, who had 

 been his fellow- student at Munich, and who remained 

 his life-long companion. Stahl, since noted as the Lest 

 modeller at the Jardin des Plant es, was then em- 

 ployed at Neufchatel. Hercule Nicolet, summoned from 

 Paris, was persuaded to set up, in this new home of 

 science, a large lithographic establishment, where were 

 published the last plates of the " Poissons Fossiles"; 

 those of the " Poissons d'Eau Douce " ; of the em- 

 bryology of Coregonus ; of the works on the Glaciers ; 

 and of the Echinoderms. 



The " Little Academy ' of Munich now took on 

 a new shape, and reappeared as La Societe des Sciences 

 Naturelles de Neufchatel. Its first meeting was in 

 December, 1832, when Louis Coulon was chosen Pre- 

 sident, and Louis Agassiz Secretary of the section of 

 Natural History. 



The next fourteen years, during which he held the 

 chair in Neufchatel, were especially his years of research 

 and publication ; and it is hardly conceivable that one 

 man, even with able assistants, could within that period 

 have done such an enormous amount of work. Thus 

 far his attention had been directed chiefly to the class 

 of fishes in which Martius had interested him. Their 

 study had led him into paleontology, because of the 

 great quantity of fossil species which had hitherto been 

 the despair of ichthyologists. Fishes whose skeleton.^ 

 were soft and which had thick muscles, were so crushed 

 and distorted as to be unrecognizable, and the viscera 

 were almost never to be distinguished. In the course 

 of an exhaustive study of their anatomy, Agassi/ 



