9 



of the project must be given up, although he was 

 indeed bitterly chagrined and excited for part of an 

 hour, when the hour had passed over it seemed as if 

 he had quite forgotten the disappointment, so enthu- 

 siastically was he occupied already with the new 

 scheme substituted by his active mind. 



Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching in our 

 community was prompt and decisive, — all the more 

 so that it struck people's imagination by its very 

 excess. The good old way of committing printed 

 abstractions to memory seems never to have received 

 such a shock as it encountered 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 maxims which Agassiz preached wherever 

 he went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric. 

 The extreme rigor 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 





