398 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
the beauty of his animated face, his enthusiasm for 
his subject which he inspired in others, made the great 
attraction. For eight years, with few interruptions, he 
gave daily lectures to us girls, always illustrating by 
specimens, maps, and by drawing on the blackboard 
in his incomparable manner. 
His courses of lectures comprised zodlogy and 
botany, geology and embryology. These lectures in- 
cluded the classification of plants and their geograph- 
ical distribution. He also gave us his famous lec- 
tures on glaciers — he having originated the glacial 
theory — and an elementary course of anthropology 
and ethnology. 
It was a wonderful gift of his to keep a classroom of 
girls alert and interested while describing the struc- 
ture of a jelly-fish, the distinction between Discophora 
and Ctenophora. Mrs. Agassiz is kind enough to say 
of us: “He never had an audience more responsive 
and more eager to learn than the sixty or seventy 
girls who gathered at the close of the morning to hear 
his daily lecture, nor did he ever give to any audience 
lectures more carefully prepared, more comprehensive 
in their range of subjects, more lofty in their tone of 
thought.” 
He spoke several times of the difficulty of translat- 
ing to us, in simple terms, the technical language of 
Science, so that we could understand him. He gave us 
a deep respect for the laborious collecting of scientific 
facts and a mistrust and dislike of what is superficial. 
At the same time his ideality appealed strongly to us, 
and some of us listened with tears in our eyes as he 
