6 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



difference between the two men may be suggested in the 

 statement that one was temperamentally a great teacher 

 and the other a great investigator. 



Jeffries Wyman, a well-known American naturalist 

 who died in 1874, once said that Alexander Agassiz had 

 already contributed more to the advancement of pure 

 science than his father. If such a statement could be 

 considered seriously then, it must have been much more 

 true in 1910, at the end of an active and busy life de- 

 voted chiefly to scientific research. 



Louis Agassiz belonged to that type of naturalist 

 which has the gift and the desire to interest the general 

 public. Men of this kind are fortunate in achieving a 

 reputation in some degree commensurate with what is 

 their due. Such men as Alexander Agassiz seldom re- 

 ceive an adequate recognition from any but their peers. 



Alexander Agassiz was born on December 17, 1835, 

 in the simplest of little apartments at Neuchatel. He 

 was the eldest of the three children of Louis Agassiz, a 

 boy and two girls. Curiously enough, it is not certain 

 what really was his full name. As a young man he 

 supposed it to be Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe, and 

 when he became an American citizen his naturaliz- 

 ation papers were so made out. Later in life, however, 

 he discovered among some old family documents a 

 certificate of birth that referred to him as Alexander 

 Rodolphe Albert. His earliest recorded adventure is an 

 expedition he made when only five or six with his 

 mother and her sister to the valley of the Aar, where 

 his father was studying the glacier, encamped on its 

 moraine in a rough stone shelter under a huge over- 

 hanging boulder known as the " Hotel des Neuchatel- 

 ois." An old lithograph shows the party clambering up 



