114 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



his prospects which the newly founded museum gave, were 

 certain men who were in some measure my teachers. First of 

 these I will note X., who had been trained by the master as 

 a mineralogist and embryologist. Although he was a man of 

 moderate parts, he had a decided capacity for the work as- 

 signed to him and taught it fairly well. From him I gained some 

 skill in the relatively limited knowledge of those subjects which 

 existed at that time, but no inspiration whatever. He was sin- 

 gularly affected by a notion that he was a genius who was in 

 process of being discovered by Agassiz, and his whole mind went 

 to securing his safety from that appropriation. While I saw 

 that there was some slight basis for this idea, it was clear to 

 me then as now that when a great and naturally avid per- 

 sonality comes in contact with a subordinate of mediocre tal- 

 ents, such a result is in some measure inevitable. I tried to 

 make the sufferer see that for the ounce of value he gave he 

 received a pound in return, but it was not in him to see it. 

 Others who came in contact with Agassiz suffered from the 

 same incapacity to understand the situation. The result in this 

 case was a break which led to X.'s retirement from the univer- 

 sity, and to his failure as a worker on his own account, which 

 ended in his death a few years afterwards. 



The other collaborator of Agassiz, who had far more influ- 

 ence on my life, was Jules Marcou, who had been his pupil, 

 though the difference in their ages was but a few years. Marcou 

 had already made a place for himself by his work on the Meso- 

 zoic rocks and his connection with the Mexican boundary sur- 

 vey. He was a native of Salins in the French Jura, but he had 

 been in this country before and had married a Boston woman 

 of distinguished family and considerable fortune. He was a 

 characteristic Frenchman, of the especial type that marks the 

 people of the region whence he came, so that they fit rather to 

 our notions of Swiss than of French. He was some inches over 

 six feet in height, slender, slightly stooped, with a handsome 

 face that reminded me much of the portrait of Leonardo da 



