34 



collections of Europe had less attractions for him than the 

 vast, unexplored regions of America. Like Humboldt he 

 fairly reveled in the vegetable and animal wealth of this 

 continent. For such men, South America, that land of 

 wonders and magnificence, with its intricate net work of 

 rivers, its dense and pathless forests swarming; with life 

 in novel and wondrous shapes, its numerous water courses 

 crowded with aquatic animals unknown elsewhere, and 

 the very air teeming with myriad shapes, gorgeous and 

 grotesque, had an irresistible attraction. 



Agassiz loved the freedom and unrestraint of our coun- 

 try as well as its newness and its novelty. He was a 

 Swiss Republican transplanted to a more congenial soil. 

 No doubt he often thought of the Revocation of the Edict 

 of Nantes, which drove his ancestry from France, and 

 notwithstanding the strong inducements which were held 

 out to him to return to Europe, well knew that where re- 

 ligion is in fetters, science is in chains. 



The scientific observer should come to his work the 

 freest of the free, unshackled by religious, political, so- 

 cial or educational prejudices. His aim is the truth, re- 

 gardless of consequences. There is vet a vast amount of 

 prejudice and bigotry in the world, standing right across 

 the path of science and blocking the way of truth. We 

 all smile at the granite bigotry and the adamantine preju- 

 dice of our ancestors who battled against truths which all 

 now admit, bin we forget that an hundred years hence 

 posterity may wonder and smile at us. How mighty are 

 the bonds of prejudice'? Who can say he is free from 

 them? Who can say he is unfettered, when even yet we 

 owe the very fashions of our garments, the forms of our 

 salutations, the proverbs which rule our common life and 

 many of our notions as to the unseen world and the world 

 to come, to peoples who lived beyond the Ganges before 

 the pyramids were built? Who can declare he is free to 

 accept the truth regardless of consequences — that he would 

 not have been a Alahomedan m Arabia — a Buddhist if 

 reared in Ohina. or a cannibal if Ins father had been king 

 of the Tono- ; \ islands. We absorb from birth. — even be- 



