148 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 



Of all these lectures the most valuable and the 

 most charming were those on the glaciers. In 

 these the master spoke, and every rock on our 

 island was a mute witness to the truth of his words. 

 Equally charming were the reminiscences of his 

 early life and of his fellow-workers in science, 

 Schimper and Braun in Munich, Valenciennes and 

 the rest in Paris, and of the three men he acknowl- 

 edged as masters, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Dollin- 

 ger. " I lived at Munich," he once said, " for 

 three years under Dr. Dollinger's roof, and my 

 scientific training goes back to him and to him 

 alone." 



He often talked to us of the Darwinian theory, 

 to which in all its forms he was most earnestly 

 opposed. Agassiz was essentially an idealist. All 

 his investigations were to him, not studies of ani- 

 mals or plants as such, but of the divine plans of 

 which their structures are the expression. " That 

 earthly form was the cover of spirit was to him a 

 truth at once fundamental and self-evident." The 

 work of the student was to search out the thoughts 

 of God, and as well as may be to think them 

 over again. To Agassiz these divine thoughts 

 were especially embodied in the relations of ani- 

 mals to each other. The species was the thought- 

 unit, the individual reproduction of the thought in 

 the divine mind at the moment of the creation of 

 the first one of the series which represents the 

 species. The marvel of the affinity of structure 

 of unity of plan in creatures widely diverse in 

 habits and outward appearance was to him a 

 result of the association of ideas in the divine mind, 



