LOUIS AGASSIZ. 4^ ( J 



giving himself with ardor to the duties of his professorship, 

 it was surely enough if he could do the author's share in the 

 production of bis great works on the fossil and the fresh- 

 water fishes, without assuming the responsibilities and cares 

 of publication as well, and even of a lithographic establish- 

 ment which he set up mainly for his own use. Bui he carried 

 on, pari passu, or nearly so, his work on fossil Mollusca, — 

 a quarto volume with nearly a hundred plates, — his mono- 

 graphs of Echinoderms, living and fossil, his investigations of 

 the enibryological development of fishes, and that Laborious 

 work, the " Nomenclator Zoologieus," with the " Biblio- 

 graphia," later published in England by the Ray Society. 

 Moreover, of scattered papers, those of the Royal Society's 

 Catalogue which antedate his arrival in this country are more 

 than threescore and ten. He had help, indeed : but the more 

 he had the more he enlarged and diversified his tasks, Hum- 

 boldt's sound advice about his zoological undertakings being 

 no more heeded than his fulminations against the glacial 

 theory. 



In the midst of all this, Agassiz turned his glance upon the 

 glaciers, and the "local phenomenon" became at once a co- 

 mic one. So far a happy divination ; but he seems to have 

 believed quite to the last that not only the temperate zones, 

 but whole intertropical continents — at least the American — 

 had been sheeted with ice. The narrative in the firsl volume 

 will give the general reader a vivid but insufficient conception 

 of the stupendous work upon which he so brilliantly labored 

 for nearly a decade of years. 



Codum non animum mutant who come with such a spirit 

 to a wider and, scientifically, less developed continent. First 

 as visitor, soon as denizen, and at length as citizen of the 

 American republic, Agassiz rose with every occasion to larger 

 and more various activities. What with the Lowell Institute, 

 the college in Charleston, South Carolina, and Cornell Uni- 

 versity, in addition to Harvard, he may be said to have held 

 three or four professorships at once, none of them Binecures. 

 He had not been two months in the country before :i staff of 

 assistants was gathered around him and a marine zobl< 



