108 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



parts for last moment, for which I am now very sorry, 

 as I come too late for my mining excursion. I was to 

 have left this morning for Saarbriicken on the French 

 and Prussian frontier, where there are some excellently 

 managed mines with capital machinery, and last night 

 railroad was taken possession of by the military, so there 

 is no passing at present, and I shall wend my way back 

 to my family a couple of days earlier. 



From Leipzig I went to Jena, saw Haeckel, but not 

 Gegenbaur, who was very sick with a malarious fever. 

 Haeckel I liked extremely ; he is, however, of a most 

 enthusiastic disposition, and in the Okenistic 1 direction 

 he has taken he is doing himself a great deal of harm. 

 He has left the positive for the speculative, and indulges 

 in fancies which are more like the dreams of Swedenborg 

 than Natural History. We got along very well, though 

 he fought rather shy of entering into any discussion. 

 They have quite a nice Zoological Laboratory there, with 

 just enough collections to teach, and the anatomical part 

 is really good, with a collection of skeletons which would 

 do honour to a large Museum. 



From Jena I went to Marburg, passed an evening with 

 Claus at the Knipe, and found him much less of a man 

 than I had expected from his work; he goes to Got- 

 tingen in place of Keferstein. 



At Geissen I saw Schneider; he is a real worker 

 and the collections here are quite remarkable. Bischoff 

 (of Munich) has left here a very large collection of 

 Embryos and fine anatomical preparations and skeletons 

 of higher animals, while Leuckart, who was the zoolo- 

 gist for more than nineteen years, has left an equally 

 valuable collection of preparations for the invertebrates; 



i Lorenz Oken, 1779-1851. 



