DESCENT AND BOYHOOD 9 



Leaving Neuchatel in March, without his family, he 

 passed some months in Paris among his scientific friends, 

 busy with the publication of his " Systeme Glaciaire." 

 When this was finished, he went to England, where he 

 was anxious to see his friend Sir Charles Lyell, who, 

 having lately given some lectures at the Lowell Institute 

 in Boston, had arranged with Mr. John Amory Lowell 

 that Professor Agassiz, on his arrival there, should 

 deliver a course. Thus the first link was forged in the 

 chain which bound Louis Agassiz and his son to the 

 New World, and fixed them in the community centred 

 about Harvard College. 



In view of her husband's departure, Mrs. Agassiz and 

 her two girls had already joined her brother, Alexander 

 Braun, who was then Professor of Botany at Carlsruhe. 

 For some months, however, Alexander remained at Neu- 

 chatel to continue his studies at Monsieur Godet's board- 

 ing-school. 



In 1847 he joined his mother at Freiburg in Baden, 

 where her brother had become Director of the Botanical 

 Garden. Here Agassiz went to the Burger School and 

 was fortunate in coming under the influence of two such 

 eminent men as his uncle, Alexander Braun, and von 

 Siebold, the naturalist, to whom he undoubtedly owed 

 much of his taste for natural history. Professor Braun 

 allowed Alexander to join the excursions that he took 

 with his pupils in the Black Forest, and von Siebold 

 gave him aid and advice in his entomological collection 

 which was sufficiently valuable to induce the savant, by 

 way of payment, to reserve the choicest specimens for 

 himself, much to the disgust of the embryo naturalist. 



There was in Freiburg a young clergyman who made 

 it part of his duty to take a number of boys on tramps 



