1 68 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



You should never trifle with Nature. At the lowest her works 

 are the works of the highest powers, the highest something in 

 whatever way we may look at it.' 



" 'A laboratory of Natural History is a sanctuary where nothing 

 profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties 

 in churches than in a scientific laboratory.' 



" 'In Europe I have been accused of taking my scientific ideas 

 from the church. In America I have been called a heretic because 

 I will not let my church-going friends pat me on the head.' 



" Of all these lectures the most valuable and the most charming 

 were those on the glaciers. In these the master spoke, and every 

 rock on our island was a mute witness to the truth of his words. 



" He often talked to us of the Darwinian theory, to which in all 

 its forms he was most earnestly opposed. Agassiz was essentially 

 an idealist. All of his investigations were to him not studies of 

 animals or plants as such, but of the divine plans of which their 

 structures are the expression. 'That earthly form was the cover 

 of spirit was to him a truth at once fundamental and self-evident.' 

 The work of the student was to search out the thoughts of God, 

 and as well as may be to think them over again. To Agassiz 

 these divine thoughts were especially embodied in the relations 

 of animals to each other. The species was the thought-mind at 

 the moment of the creation of the first one of the series which repre- 

 sents the species. The marvel of the affinity of structure, of unity 

 of plan in creatures widely diverse in habits and outward appear- 

 ances, was to him a result of the association of ideas in the divine 

 mind, an illustration of divine many-sidedness. To Darwin these 

 same relations would illustrate the force of heredity acting under 

 diverse conditions of environment. 



" Agassiz had no sympathy with the prejudices worked upon by 

 weak and foolish men in opposition to Darwinism. He believed 

 in the absolute freedom of science; that no power on earth can give 

 answers beforehand to the questions which men of science en- 

 deavor to solve. Of this I can give no better evidence than the 

 fact that every one of the men specially trained by him has joined 

 the ranks of the evolutionists. He would teach them to think for 

 themselves, not to think as he did." 



