134 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 
make his whole strength count, because no artifi- 
cial barriers would come between him and the 
student. 
From the time that Agassiz landed on our shores 
till his death, he became more and more intensely 
American. He was all the more American because 
his life in Europe had made him keenly alive to 
the evil effects of barriers of all sorts, social, politi- 
cal, economic, to all the thousand forms of injus- 
tice and oppression which accompany despotism or 
paternalism in government. The American idea 
of freedom in growth and equality in opportunity 
found in him an earnest apostle, and in the ulti- 
mate triumph of this idea he had never the slight- 
est doubt. 
He was above all else a teacher. His work in 
America was that of a teacher of science, — of sci- 
ence in the broadest sense as the orderly arrange- 
ment of the results of all human experience. He 
would teach men to know, not simply to remember 
or to guess. He believed that men in all walks of 
life would be more useful and more successful 
through the thorough development of the powers 
of observation and judgment. He believed that 
the sense of reality should be the central axis of 
human life. He would have the student trained 
through contact with real things, not merely exer- 
cised in the recollection of the book descriptions 
of things. “If you study Nature in books,” he 
said, “when you go out of doors you cannot find 
her.” 
Agassiz was once asked to write a text-book in 
zodlogy for the use of schools and colleges. Of 
