LATER YEARS 413 



was the only decoration that Carlyle would accept. It 

 is especially appreciated by men of the learned and 

 artistic world, because a vacancy in the foreign member- 

 ship is virtually filled by their peers ; for the German 

 knights of the order send the Emperor three names, one 

 of which he chooses. 



In the spring of 1908, the Royal Geographical Society 

 awarded Agassiz the Victoria Research Medal. In his 

 absence, the United States Ambassador represented him 

 at a meeting of the Society and received the medal from 

 Major Leonard Darwin, the President. This medal is 

 perhaps the most beautiful of any of its kind. Agassiz 

 delighted in its exquisite workmanship, and with the sim- 

 plicity of a child would call on his friends to admire it. 



At one time President of both the National Academy 

 of Science and the American Academy of Arts and 

 Sciences, with every honor that the learned world of 

 Europe had to offer, honors that were all the more re- 

 markable in that they were never in any way sought by 

 Agassiz, he was undoubtedly better known in America 

 as the head of a great mining industry than as one of 

 the most distinguished scientific men of his generation. 

 He walked unrecognized through the streets of Cam- 

 bridge, and shared with other men of science in the 

 land of his adoption the fate of being more appreciated 

 abroad than at home, for most Americans seem singu- 

 larly incapable of weighing at its true value anything 

 that does not lead directly to material ends. 



Surely no two American laborers could have filled the 

 roles of a couple of recently arrived French emigrants, 

 who were once overheard, on a wharf at Newport, com- 

 miserating each other on the barrenness of the desolate 

 waste in which they found themselves; one of them 



