WALCOTT] LOUIS AGASSIZ 21 7 



or less hampered by the abundance of the material on which it 

 worked." 



Agassiz's extraordinary geniality and the sincerity of his manner 

 drew every one to him. The acknowledged leader of a group in- 

 cluding Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, and Hawthorne, he 

 was the friend of laborers and fishermen, who took a childish delight 

 in gathering specimens for the "Great Professor." He measured men 

 by a high standard, and created a new environment for himself. 

 Those who loved him lived in mansions and in huts ; he imbued the 

 rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant, alike with an ap- 

 preciation of the beauties of the science he loved and with his almost 

 matchless enthusiasm for the noble in life. In fact, it was as a 

 leader of men, as the teacher of thousands who gained inspiration 

 and power from his boundless enthusiasm and his loving personality, 

 that he was most widely known. 



Agassiz's life was a continual proof of his superiority over self- 

 interest and his consecration to science. He declared that he could 

 not afford to waste his time in making money. He declined the 

 chair of Zoology at Heidelberg when by accepting it he would have 

 more than doubled his income, and he successfully opposed the 

 making of his name a part of the official designation both of the 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and of the Anderson 

 School of Natural History on Penikese Island. It would be difficult 

 to measure his influence in the way of causing men of political and 

 commercial power to realize that the support of scientific research 

 and the diffusion of the knowledge thereby gained depend largely 

 on them. 



Men are now more and more contributing to the advancement of 

 science under the impulse of a sentiment Agassiz created ; he set a 

 new standard for the art of teaching ; the first recognition of ice as a 

 great geologic agent was due chiefly to his investigations ; and, as a 

 result of his work on fossil fishes, there was established a funda- 

 mental law which has since found expression in the words "Ontogeny 

 repeats phylogeny" — a law which, it would seem, is destined to guide 

 biologists for numberless generations. 



Many of us knew Louis Agassiz personally, perhaps a few of us 

 knew him intimately, and our admiration of his genius and our love 

 of the man were and are almost unbounded. Here in this noble 

 building we now place a visible token of this nation's admiration of 

 his great intellect, of its realization of the debt it owes him for his 

 consecration to science, and of its love for his simple but sublime 



