IT HAS been said of Louis Agassiz: "In his 

 later American travels he would talk of glacial pheno- 

 mena to the driver of a country stagecoach among the 

 mountains, or to some workman, splitting rock at the 

 road-side, with as much earnestness as if he had been 

 discussing problems with a brother geologist; he would 

 take the common fisherman into his scientific confi- 

 dence, telling him the intimate secrets of fish-structure 

 or fish-embryology, till the man in his turn became 

 enthusiastic, and began to pour out information from 

 the stores of his own rough and untaught habits of 

 observation. Agassiz s general faith in the suscepti- 

 bility of the popular intelligence, however untrained, 

 to the highest truths of nature, was contagious, and he 

 created or developed that in which.he believed." 



