510 ZOOLOGY 



auspices, with a remarkable faculty, and was attracting 

 many students. So, after a year at Heidelberg, 

 Agassiz decided to migrate, and with him went his 

 greatest friend among the students, Alexander Braun. 

 Many records exist, showing the intensity of Agassiz's 

 life in the university. With his friends Braun and 

 Schimper he seemed able to attack every difficult 

 problem. The three were so closely associated that 

 the students called them the "Clover leaf." After 

 the day's work these men, with a few others, would 

 meet and deliver lectures. The association thus formed 

 came to be known as the " Little Academy," and 

 eminent men would often look in upon it, with ex- 

 pressions of interest and sympathy. The young 

 lecturers deemed all this valuable experience, "since," 

 they said, "we all desire nothing so much as sooner or 

 later to become professors in very truth, after having 

 played at professor in the university." Their poverty 

 was no check to their activities, and their life was 

 picturesquely bohemian. Braun, in his letters home, 

 gave some graphic descriptions : "A live gudgeon with 

 beautiful stripes is wriggling in Agassiz's washbowl, and 

 he has adorned his table with monkeys. We stay 

 together in his room or mine by turns, so as not to 

 need heat in two rooms, and not to burn twice as 

 much for light. . . . Under Agassiz's new style of 

 housekeeping, the coffee is made in a machine 

 which is devoted during the day to the soaking of 

 all sorts of creatures for skeletons, and in the even- 

 ing again to the brewing of our tea." More and 

 more, zoology became the passion of Agassiz's life, 

 and the studies in medicine, ostensibly the occasion 

 of his presence at the university, were increasingly 

 neglected. 



