AGASSIZ ON PALEONTOLOGY. 373 



may entertain as to the interpretation of some 

 of these generalizations, the vast importance 

 of these results of Agassiz's studies may be 

 appreciated by the incontestable fact, that 

 nearly all the questions which modern pale- 

 ontology has treated are here raised and in 

 great measure solved. They already form a 

 code of general laws which has become a 

 foundation for the geological history of the 

 life-system, and which the subsequent investi- 

 gations of science have only modified and ex- 

 tended, not destroyed. Nowhere did the mind 

 of Agassiz show more power of generalization, 

 more vigor, or more originality. The discov- 

 ery of these great truths is truly his work ; 

 he derived them immediately from nature by 

 his own observations. Hence it is that all his 

 later zoological investigations tend to a com- 

 mon aim, namely, to give by farther studies, 

 equally conscientious but more extensive, a 

 broader and more solid basis to those laws 

 which he had read in nature and which he 

 had proclaimed at that early date in his im- 

 mortal work, ' Poissons Fossiles.' Let us not 

 be astonished that he should have remained 

 faithful to these views to the end of his life. 

 It is because he had seen that he believed, 

 and such a faith is not easily shaken by new 

 hypotheses." 



