746 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 72. 



absolute devotion to natural history and faith 

 in his own powers. At Munich, with his 

 naturalist student Mends, " almost everything 

 was enjoyed in common; work, pleasure, jour- 

 neys, pipes, beer, purses, clothes, ideas, political 

 and philosophical, or poetical, and even liter- 

 arjf. In fact, it was a constant, enthusiastic, 

 intellectual life, lived at high pressure, lacking 

 in nothing; not even student-duels, and esca- 

 pades of a more riotous nature after grand 

 ' Kommers.' Agassiz enjoyed, among the stu- 

 dents, the reputation of being the best fencer 

 in the various students' clubs * * * . Strange 

 to say, with an allowance of only $250 a year, 

 [he] managed constantly to keep in his pay an 

 artist, Dinkel, to draw fossil and living fishes, 

 and occasionally a second artist, Weber, to 

 draw the Spix fishes and pieces of anatomy. 

 They formed a sort of fraternal association. 

 As Agassiz said, ' They were even poorer than 

 I, and so we managed to get along together.' 

 Their fare was certainly very simple, bread, 

 cheese, beer and tobacco being the main articles. 

 Imagine Agassiz, with his scanty allowance, 

 providing for two artists, besides Carl Schimper 

 and his younger brother, William Schimper. 

 To be sure, Alexander Braun helped much 

 also. But if we suppose that Braun got $300 a 

 year from his father, six young men, betAveen 

 the ages of twenty and twenty-five, had to live 

 upon less than $600 a year, out of which, also, 

 they had to pay for their studies at the Uni- 

 versity and provide themselves with instru- 

 ments and books and clothing. Agassiz got a 

 little money from the ' Brazilian fishes ' and 

 some other writing, with which he purchased a 

 microscope — a rather expensive instrument — 

 and several books; and he received, as a gift, 

 from Prof Dollinger, a copy of the finely illus- 

 trated work on living fishes by the great French 

 ichthyologist, Rondelet, of Montpelier. The 

 editor Cotta sent him also a considerable num- 

 ber of expensive natural history books. * * * 

 His room was used as lecture-room, assembly- 

 hall, laboratory and museum. Some one was 

 always coming or going. The half-dozen chairs 

 were covered with books, piled one upon an- 

 other, hardly one being left for use, and visitors 

 were frequently obliged to remove books and 

 j)ut them on the floor; the bed also was used as 



a seat, and as a receptacle for specimens, 

 drawings and papers. According to Agassiz, 

 the tobacco smoke was sometimes so thick that 

 it might have been cut with a knife. Agassiz 

 was the most prominent among the students. 

 His acquaintance was courted by all. * * * 

 He was considered a most amiable companion, 

 never losing his temper, always smiling and 

 apparently contented and happy. * « * * 

 There is no other example of such a rapid 

 rise to great scientific reputation as Agassiz en- 

 joyed in his thirtieth year. * * * His power of 

 classifying fossils and his success in reducing to 

 order thousands of specimens of fishes, a great 

 many of which were perfect puzzles to every- 

 one, were simply marvellous ; and he worked 

 at his herculean task as no man but a man of 

 genius could have done." (Vol. I., pp. 25, 113.) 

 Probably no one again will ever have as vast 

 an acquaintance with living things as Agassiz 

 possessed. No man will love Nature's forms 

 more passionately. But biological science now 

 expects more help from what the pedagogues 

 call ' intensive' than from ' extensive ' study, 

 and her progress will for the present probably 

 consist more in the unravelling of causes and 

 conditions than in the description of new sur- 

 face facts. Agassiz is the last of the type of 

 great naturalists who took the individual forms 

 of Nature at their simple surface value as living 

 wholes. Causal laws have their nobility of out- 

 look too, but it is of more abstract and sadder 

 sort. ' Die Form ist zerbrochen, von Aussen 

 herein, ' we may say with the poet, when we 

 come to deal with recent speculative biology; 

 and those thoughts of God that Agassiz con- 

 ceived himself to read ofl^ so easily were no 

 doubt in form at least more like the real 

 thoughts of God, in being intuitions of fully 

 concrete facts, than are those poor naked forces 

 and processes and logical elements of things 

 with which our later science deals. Some day 

 our descendants may get round to that higher 

 way of looking at Nature again. Meanwhile 

 from this book, as from every possible book 

 about Agassiz, there floats up a breath as of the 

 morning of life, that makes defects of taste and 

 small in accuracies seem of little account. We 

 recommend it therefore to our readers cordially 

 enough. 



