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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. V. No. 112. 



people's imagination by its very excess. 

 Tlie good old way of committing printed 

 abstractions to memory seems never to 

 have received such a shock as it encoun- 

 tered at his hands. There is probably no 

 public school teacher now in New England 

 who will not tell you how Agassiz used to 

 lock a student up in a room full of turtle 

 shells, or lobster shells or oyster shells, 

 without a book or word to help him, and 

 not let him out till he had discovered all 

 the truths which the objects contained. 

 Some found the truths after weeks and 

 months of lonely sorrow ; others never 

 found them. Those who found them were 

 already made into naturalists thereby ; the 

 failures were blotted from the book of 

 honor and of life. "Go to nature; take 

 the facts into your own hands ; look and 

 see for yourself!" These were the max- 

 ims which Agassiz preached wherever he 

 went, and their effect on pedagogy was 

 electric. The extreme vigor of his devotion 

 to this concrete method of learning was the 

 natural consequence of his own peculiar 

 type of intellect, in which the capacity for 

 abstraction and causal reasoning and tra- 

 cing chains of consequences from hypotheses 

 was so much less developed than the genius 

 for acquaintance with vast volumes of de- 

 tail and for seizing upon analogies and re- 

 lations of the more proximate and concrete 

 kind. While on the Thayer expedition I 

 remember that I often put questions to him 

 about the facts of our new tropical habitat, 

 but I doubt if he ever answered one of these 

 questions of mine outright. He always 

 said : " There, you see you have a definite 

 problem ; go and look and find the answer 

 for yourself." His severity in this line was 

 a living rebuke to all abstractionists and 

 would-be biological philosophers. More 

 than once have I heard him quote with 

 deep feeling the lines from Faust : 



"Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 

 Und griin des Lebens eoldner Baum." 



The only man he really loved and had 

 use for was the man who could bring him 

 facts. To see facts, not to argue or raison- 

 niren, was what life meant for him ; and I 

 think he often positively loathed the ratio- 

 cinating type of mind. "Mr. Blank, you 

 are totally uneducated ! " I heard him once 

 say to a student who proponded to him 

 some glittering theoretic generality. And 

 on a similar occasion he gave an admoni- 

 tion that must have sunk deep into the 

 heart of him to whom it was addressed: 

 " Mr. X., some people perhaps now con- 

 sider you a bright young man ; but when 

 you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of 

 you then, what they say will be this : 

 ' That X. — oh, yes, I know him ; he used 

 to be a very bright young man! ' " Happy 

 is the conceited youth who at the proper 

 moment receives such salutarj' cold water 

 therapeutics as this from one who, in other 

 respects, is a kind friend. We cannot all 

 escape from being abstractionists. I my- 

 self, for instance, have never been able to 

 escape ; but the hours I spent with Agassiz 

 so taught me the difference between all 

 possible abstractionists and all livers in the 

 light of the world's concrete fulness, that I 

 have never been able to forget it. Both 

 kinds of mind have their place in the 

 infinite design, but there can be no question 

 as to which kind lies the nearer to the 

 divine type of thinking. 



Agassiz's view of Nature was saturated 

 with simple religious feeling, and for this 

 deep but unconventional religiosity he found 

 at Harvard the most sympathetic possible 

 environment. In the fifty years that have 

 sped since he arrived here our knowledge 

 of Nature has penetrated into joints and re- 

 cesses which his vision never pierced. The 

 causal elements and not the totals are what 

 we are now most passionately concerned 

 to understand ; and naked and poverty- 

 stricken enough do the stripped-out ele- 

 ments and forces occasionally appear to us 



