24 — 



judging by their conduct, I should say they was." Then, the great 

 naturalist was taken for a harmless lunatic ; but he persisted and 

 the people at last listened to his precept and followed his example. 

 And if, to-day in almost any part of the United States, a man may 

 pursue living creatures otherwise than for sport, and talk of them 

 for another object than passing an idle hour, and nevertheless retain 

 the respect of the community ; if in short the occupations of 

 natural history collecting and teaching are now honorable and at 

 least more lucrative than before, it is to Agassiz more than any 

 other one man that the change must be ascribed. 



The one man Agassiz did the work of four. He was an in- 

 vestigator, and a promoter of research, a popular teacher and the 

 founder and curator of a great museum. What had he in return ? 

 Besides the pleasure of doing, a pitiful stipend, a most laborious 

 life, and a premature death. But for continual overwork and 

 anxieties, most of which could have been arrested by the financial 

 support which — matchless beggar though he was for others and for 

 science — he neither asked nor gained for himself,* he might be 

 speaking to you to-day in person, rather than through his friends. 



If his life may be held up as a splendid example, his death, at 

 sixty-six, twenty years too soon, should be regarded as a solemn 

 warning to the enthusiastic naturalist not to drive his too willing 

 horse, himself, to death, and to the community and those who 

 represent the community in the control of educational funds, not 

 to delay the practical recognition of a man's value until he is 

 claimed elsewhere or until death makes repentance too late. Ag- 

 assiz left us before his time because he did too much for us and we 

 too little for him. 



On the 8th of August, 1873, but a few months before his death, 

 speaking of the recent loss of a valued assistant, Agassiz said : 

 "My time will come soon, and I am ready." How many of us 

 can say that with sincerety? 



*In 1869 he wrote me : "Every year I am less inclined to work 

 for money," and I know that when he did, the sums so hardly earned 

 were expended not for personal comfort or in providing for the future, 

 but in the purchase of specimens or in the employment of others to 

 do what he had not time to do himself. 



