134 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 



make his whole strength count, because no artifi- 

 cial barriers would come between him and the 

 student. 



From the time that Agassiz landed on our shores 

 till his death, he became more and more intensely 

 American. He was all the more American because 

 his life in Europe had made him keenly alive to 

 the evil effects of barriers of all sorts, social, politi- 

 cal, economic, to all the thousand forms of injus- 

 tice and oppression which accompany despotism or 

 paternalism in government The American idea 

 of freedom ingrowth and equality in opportunity 

 found in him an earnest apostle, and in the ulti- 

 mate triumph of this idea he had never the slight- 

 est doubt. 



He was above all else a teacher. His work in 

 America was that of a teacher of science, of sci- 

 ence in the broadest sense as the orderly arrange-, 

 ment of the results of all human experience. He 

 would teach men to know, not simply to remember 

 or to guess. He believed that men in all walks of 

 life would be more useful and more successful 

 through the thorough development of the powers 

 of observation and judgment. He believed that 

 the sense of reality should be the central axis of 

 human life. He would have the student trained 

 through contact with real things, not merely exer- 

 cised in the recollection of the book descriptions 

 of things. " If you study Nature in books," he 

 said, " when you go out of doors you cannot find 

 her." 



Agassiz was once asked to write a text-book in 

 zoology for the use of schools and colleges. Of 



