SCHOLARLY HABITS. 13 



to stay at Bienne till the month of July, and 

 afterward serve my apprenticeship in com- 

 merce at Neuchatel for a year and a half. 

 Then I should like to pass four years at a 

 university in Germany, and finally finish my 

 studies at Paris, where I would stay about 

 five years. Then, at the age of twenty-five, 

 I could begin to write." 



Agassiz's note-books, preserved by his par- 

 ents, who followed the education of their chil- 

 dren with the deepest interest, give evidence 

 of his faithful work both at school and college. 

 They form a great pile of manuscript, from 

 the paper copy-books of the school-boy to the 

 carefully collated reports of the college stu- 

 dent, begun when the writer was ten or eleven 

 years of age and continued with little inter- 

 ruption till he was eighteen or nineteen. The 

 later volumes are of nearly quarto size and 

 very thick, some of them containing from four 

 to six hundred closely covered pages ; the 

 handwriting is small, no doubt for economy 

 of space, but very clear. The subjects are 

 physiological, pathological, and anatomical, 

 with more or less of general natural history. 

 This series of books is kept with remarkable 

 neatness. Even in the boy's copy-books, con- 

 taining exercises in Greek, Latin, French and 



