May i8, i«93j 



NATURE 



53 



to him, " Be careful, and remember that work kills," had 

 been, perhaps of necessity, neglected. The day after 

 they were spoken the great naturalist had been stricken 

 to death by paralysis. They were equally prophetic in 

 the case of Agassiz, for by his sixty- seventh year even his 

 vigorous constitution was worn out. 



Agassi z was a born teacher. As one of his admirers says, 

 " His greatest work in science was his influence upon other 

 men." Surely this is one of the best of epitaphs. This 

 memoir contains some pithy sayings worth remembering 

 in our generation. These are a few samples—" It is a 

 false idea to suppose that anybody is competent to learn 

 or to teach anything ; " " The mind is made strong not 

 through much learning but by the thorough possession 

 of something ; " " Learn to read the book of Nature for 

 yourself ; " " Train your pupils to be observers ; " " It is 

 better to have a few forms well known than to teach a 

 little about many hundred species;" "The study of 

 Nature is an intercourse with the highest mind." A 

 remark, also of his, has a lesson for this age of many 

 books, when he said, commenting on his early difficulties 

 in obtaining them, that "he believed it had been really 

 an advantage, for it prevented him from relying too much 

 on them, their absence forcing him to investigate for 

 himself." 



Dr. Holder compares the influence of Agassiz in 

 America with that of Darwin in England. It was in many 

 respects very different, as were the men ; yet they had 

 much in common : the same intense love of nature, the 

 same thirst for knowledge, the same indomitable energy 

 in the pursuit of it. They were alike in being seriously 

 hampered : Agassiz by poverty, at any rate in the earlier 

 part of his life, for many a time his mind had to be fed 

 at the expense of his body ; Darwin by ill health in the 

 larger and later part. Yet they were very different : the 

 one in constant intercourse with his fellow men, the 

 enthusiastic leader of a band of students, the centre of 

 a society; the other compelled to lead a recluse life. 

 They looked also upon nature from different standpoints. 

 Agassiz was unable to accept Darwin's views as to the 

 origin of species, though it is curious to see what con- 

 cessions he was prepared to make in regard to a pro- 

 gression from an embryonic stage to one of high develop- 

 ment. This, however, must be by successive creations, 

 not by evolution. In regard to the latter he apparently 

 shared the fears of not a few other religious men, and 

 failed to see that the vision of Mother Carey in Peace- 

 pool, " making things make themselves," may be as 

 full an expression of the operation of a Divine Mind as 

 any scheme of creation. 



Agassiz, though he had a hard struggle, was fortunate 

 in many respects : in the possession of good parents, a 

 vigorous frame, and a sound constitution ; above all, in 

 acquiring the friendship of such men as Cuvier and 

 Humboldt at the age when their help was most needed. 

 He was happy, like Darwin, in his family life, with a wife 

 who was a helpmate, and a son who followed his footsteps, 

 and still does honour to the name. Like Darwin also, he 

 was felix opportunitate vita: et mortis. Both had 

 their obstacles to overcome, and their difficulties to con- 

 quer, but they would have found these more formidable, 

 because more insidious, in the present generation. Is an 

 Agassiz or a Darwin any longer a possible product? I 

 NO. 1229, vol . 48] 



Natural science is now sometimes in danger of becoming 

 a department of literature or a branch of physics. 

 These men went to nature for their teaching rather than 

 to books : now they would find it hard to avoid being 

 smothered with " the literature of the subject," and 

 being choked \Vith the dust of libraries. To read the 

 life of the genuine lover of out-door nature such as 

 Agassiz or Darwin, is like a breath from a glacier in the- 

 valley of the Rhone ; to study the record of a life so sim- 

 ple, so earnest, so pure, so reverent, is a lesson for alt 

 time. 



T. G. BONNEY. 



OUR BOOK SHELF. 



Beitriigeznr Biologie und Anatomic der Lianen, im Beson-^ 

 deren der in Brasilien einheimischen Arten. Von Dr. 

 H. Schenck. Zweiter Theil. Beitrage zur Anatomic- 

 der Lianen. 8vo. pp. 271, tt. 12. (Jena : Gustav 

 Fischer, 1893.) 



In a brief notice of the first part of Dr. Schenck's 

 "Beitrage" (Nature, vol. xli., p. 514), the fact that it 

 was only the first part was overlooked ; hence the remark 

 that all the plates of that part were devoted to the illus- 

 tration of the e.xternal morphology of chiefly woody 

 climbers loses the force it would have had, had it referred 

 to the whole work. The second part has now appeared, 

 and this treats of the anatomy, whilst the first treats of 

 the biology of this class of plants. The two volumes 

 form a valuable book of reference on this subject ; and 

 the illustrations include examples of the anatomy of the 

 stems of climbing plants belonging to about twenty-five 

 natural orders. There are twelve large folded plates con- 

 taining 178 figures, all very laboriously and carefully 

 drawn. The Sapindace^ and LeguminosK are most 

 numerously represented, and present some highly curious 

 structures. 



W. B. H. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected ' 

 manuscripts intended for this or any other part of Nature. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications.^ 



The Late Solar Eclipse. 



In his account of the work of the Eclipse Expedition at 

 Fundium Mr. Fowler seeks to explain his inability to obtain 

 the photographs at the moment of totality by the assumption 

 that he received the signal of the beginning of totality at least 

 ten seconds too late, and he bases this assumption on his own 

 estimate of the difference in time which elapsed between my 

 signal and that of M. Coculesco, one of the French observers 

 at Fundium. 



I did not hear M. Coculesco's signal, as my head was neces- 

 sarily enveloped in the dark cloth of my photometer at the 

 moment, but M. Deslandres, the chief of the French party, with 

 whom I returned to Europe, tells me that he estimated the inter- 

 val at about two seconds, with which estimate M. Coculesco 

 concurs. 



There would seem to be good reason to believe that the actual 

 time of the total phase was several seconds less than we had been 

 led to expect. The chronometer observations at Fundium 

 (lat. 14" 7') gave 243 seconds. M. Bigourdan, who was specially 

 charged by the Bureau des Longitudes to make accurate observa- 

 tions on this point at Joal, which is a few miles to the west of 

 Fundium, and in lat. 14" 9'. informs me that the total phase 

 there was 241 seconds. 



It is possible, therefore, that Mr. Fowler's estimate of 10 

 seconds may not only have been erroneous in consequence of 

 the known difi'iculty of accurately estimating a time interval 



