98 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



them survived him. After leaving the children at Mal- 

 vern, he took a short trip with his wife through Scotland, 

 and then crossed to Belfast to visit Wyville Thomson, 

 who had just returned from a dredging expedition on 

 the Porcupine. Agassiz was naturally much interested 

 in examining the collections brought back, and to learn 

 that some specimens had been dredged from twenty-five 

 hundred fathoms, an unheard-of depth in those days. 



In writing to his father on October 19, he says: 

 u Je suis ici chez Thomson qui est de premiere force 

 et un individu qu'il faut soigner." Two pleasant visits 

 to Lord Bnniskillen and Sir Philip Egerton, old friends 

 of his father's, closed the visit to Ireland. 



He was in London from November 11 to December 

 3, living with his family in lodgings on Jermyn Street. 

 While there he made the acquaintance of most of the 

 scientific men of the day, including Lyell, Owen, Hooker, 

 Lubbock, Huxley, Wallace, and Darwin. The class dis- 

 criminations in Great Britain seem to have much annoyed 

 him ; in one of his letters home he writes : " What a 

 state of things for the 19th Century ! If it strikes me 

 here, what will it be on the continent ! I cannot imagine 

 how people with any common sense will submit to such 

 caste distinctions and so much nonsense." 



His days were spent in working at the British Museum, 

 and sight-seeing with Mrs. Agassiz. In the evening, 

 when he was not dining at one of the scientific societies, 

 they would go to dinner with one of his new friends. 

 From Mrs. Agassiz's journal we learn that one evening, 

 after dining at the Philosophical Society, he went to 

 the Royal Society, where he gave a short speech on the 

 deep-sea dredging of Pourtales, and then slipped off to 

 McMillan's to have a chat with Tom Hughes over the 



