490 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



From his student days, when he and Braun and Schimper used 

 to expound to each other what they had learned, down to 

 the summer at Penikese his last on earth he took no less 

 pleasure in imparting than in acquiring knowledge. And 

 his teaching was singularly impressive. He made his pupils 

 not only know, but understand. Laboratory work and origi- 

 nal research were his chief educational appliances years be- 

 fore other instructors had escaped from the bondage of text- 

 books. " If you study Nature in books," he said, " when you 

 go out of doors you can not find her." This mode of instruc- 

 tion, then so novel, often induced in his students at first a com- 

 ical feeling of despair. " Observation and comparison," writes 

 Mrs. Agassiz,* "being in his'opinion the intellectual tools most 

 indispensable to the naturalist, his first lesson was one in 

 looking. He gave no assistance; he simply left his student 

 with the specimen, telling him to use his eyes diligently and 

 report upon what he saw. He returned from time to time to 

 inquire after the beginner's progress, but he never asked him a 

 leading question, never pointed out a single feature of the 

 structure, never prompted an inference or a conclusion. This 

 process lasted sometimes for days, the professor requiring the 

 pupil not only to distinguish the various parts of the animal, 

 but to detect also the relation of these details to more general 

 typical features." Mr. Samuel H. Scudder, in his essay In the 

 Laboratory with Agassiz, gives an amusing account of such a 

 first lesson, entirely devoted to a single fish. 



Agassiz never accepted the theory of evolution in the ani- 

 mal kingdom, although Darwin's Origin of Species was before 

 the world during the last fourteen years of his life. On this 

 account he is sometimes spoken of as a naturalist who fell be- 

 hind the progress of his age. Yet, excepting Darwin, no man of 

 his time did so much to carry the science of zoology forward 

 as he. Agassiz was to Darwin as he who lays the firm, level 

 track is to the builder of the locomotive. Without him evolu- 

 tion might still he butting against the ledges of prejudice or 

 floundering in the sloughs of vague knowledge. Prof. Joseph 

 Le Conte says, " I think it can be shown that to Agassiz, more 

 than to any other man, is due the credit of having established 

 the laws of succession of living forms in the geological history 



* Louis Agassiz : his Life and Correspondence, p. 566. 



