788 LOUIS AGASSIZ. 



last, preferred the cheerful company of the collegians. Whenever we came to 

 a gravel-pit, or a railway cut, the professor would stop, and would expatiate on 

 the structure of the drift with as much interest as if he saw it for the first 

 time. This enthusiasm, fresh and untiring over trite facts, was a source of 

 immense power to him. It showed his French blood, for it was but an 

 enlargement of that peculiar temper which renders the Parisian workman at 

 once the most interesting and the most successful in the world. 



Of the section of conglomerate in Roxbury he was never tired of talking ; 

 and, over and over again, to different sets of hearers, would he explain the 

 cleavage planes of the rock, and how the cleavage had cut right through hard 

 pebbles like a knife ; then the structure of the stone itself, and the different 

 origins of flat and of rounded pebbles ; and, finally, he would climb to the 

 top of the ledge, and earnestly show the grooves and scratches running north 

 and south, and the surface polished by glaciers. 



It is very curious that he never learned to make finished drawings — curious, 

 because he had often been too poor to employ an artist, and because his 

 accuracy of eye and of touch were remarkable. If there were ten hairs iu 

 the field of the microscope and the artis-t had put eleven in the drawing, the 

 professor would exclaim, the moment he got his head over the eye-piece, 

 " Those cilia are crowded ; there must be too many." He would hold the 

 dried shell of the turtle in his left hand and with a saw divide it lengthwise 

 into precise halves, with no other guide than his eye. Although he never 

 attempted to become an artist, his chalk outlines on the blackboard were 

 what few artists can make. The thousands of people who have heard his 

 lectures will always recollect the astonishing rapidity with which he drew an 

 animal, putting in only the characteristic points. If he were saying, " The 

 salmons have a peculiar fatty fin, called the adipose," almost with the words 

 would appear an unmistakable outline of the fish. There was no better nor 

 more pitiless critic of a zoological drawing. He rarely was satisfied with the 

 finest work. Were the artist painstaking, he would encourage him with, 

 " Try it once again ; it is all wrong, but don't get out of patience." The 

 careless or self-sufficient draughtsman got a brisk admonition. The man who 

 never failed to please him was Sonrel, who made the plates for the " Embry- 

 ology of Turtles," of which Claparede said, " I had supposed that such lith- 

 ography was impossible." 



It was interesting to notice his behavior in the presence of domesticated ani- 

 mals. The ugliest, filthiest, stupidest, most unreasonable, most obstinate 

 creature in the barnyard is the pig, yet, with a stick in his hand, Agassiz 

 would go up to the most unsociable, " cantakerous," misanthropic grunter, 



