2 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



a piece of silver given him by the municipality of Orbe, 

 a much-valued heirloom in the possession of a great- 

 grandson, attests that his influence was as great in the 

 schools as in the pulpit. He seems to have been of a 

 liberal turn of mind, for he used to go out shooting 

 early of a Sunday morning, and, returning homeward as 

 the congregation was gathering, it was his habit to lean 

 his gun against the church doorway, when he went in 

 to preach his sermon. He married a member of a family 

 of well-known Swiss physicians, Rose Mayor of Cudre- 

 fin on Lake Neuchatel. A tradition among her descend- 

 ants declares that in the family councils of her day her 

 firmness of will was the deciding force. 



Louis Agassiz, the eldest surviving child of this mar- 

 riage, was born in 1807 while his father was settled in 

 the parsonage of the little village of Motier on the Lake 

 of Morat, to the east of Lake Neuchatel. Owing to the 

 slender means of the family, his mother was much op- 

 posed to his desire to become a naturalist, so he acquired 

 the foundation of his scientific education while fitting 

 himself to be a doctor of medicine. This double devo- 

 tion caused his mother no little uneasiness ; with much 

 shrewdness she held that, for a penniless boy, the life of 

 a naturalist, delightful if one had an income of fifty 

 thousand francs a year, was little less than sheer madness. 

 So for a short period he actually practiced medicine ; 

 it was not possible, however, to keep him long from the 

 path for which nature intended him, and he was soon 

 started on that brilliant career, of which no description 

 is necessary. 1 



While making the rounds of the German universities, 



1 See Louis Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence, by Elizabeth C. 



