110 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



Paris and Frankfort. The passengers were informed that 

 any one who wished to come back could go no further, 

 but that there was a train ready to return to Mannheim. 

 Agassiz was almost the only one to turn back. On his 

 arrival at the station, the hotel porter beheld him de- 

 scending from what seemed his private train. Thus, on 

 his reappearance at the inn, he was received with more 

 reverence than ever. 



The train to Switzerland was jammed with people 

 leaving Germany; at the junctions were travelers wait- 

 ing by thousands to get back to France, while mountains 

 of neglected trunks lay piled up on the platforms. To 

 add to the confusion, the bridge across the Rhine, lead- 

 ing to Strassburg, was cut, and the unfortunate exodus 

 was compelled to proceed to Basle. Here confusion 

 reigned supreme; after spending the night on the floor 

 of a hotel, Agassiz in some way got out of the town, 

 and joined his wife at Lausanne. 



The family spent the rest of the summer in wander- 

 ing about in the Alps, among other things visiting the 

 elder Agassiz's haunts on the glacier of the Aar, and 

 hunting up the relatives of his guides at Meiringen. A 

 few extracts from a letter to Mrs. Louis Agassiz in 

 September tell something of the exciting events of the 

 day: — 



"You hear nothing but war, of course, and the excite- 

 ment runs very high ; in the French cantons the feeling 

 is rather for the French, and the German cantons the 

 opposite, as is natural. It is really melancholy to see 

 how low the French have fallen and what abominable 

 results their government has brought about, a system of 

 lying from the highest officials to the lowest, corruption 



