In Agassiz's life of sixty-seven years, one trait that 

 cannot fail to strike us is his persistent cultivation of the 

 homely old virtue of industry. In this he was not ex- 

 celled by Humboldt, Olivier, or Franklin. Who has ever 

 reached eminence in the field of science without it '? 

 How often does close examination prove that, after all, 

 a great reputation is due more to honest, persistent, hard 

 work than any special talent or genius. We so like to 

 picture the hero and demigod in man that we are prone 

 to forget the scholar in his long vigils, the student in his 

 years of silent toil up the steep and rugged ascent, pre- 

 ferring to believe that genius at a bound compassed the 

 long roacl and the lofty eminence. The fact is the hard- 

 est workers are men like Agassiz, driven through life by 

 an enthusiasm that will suffer no rest, and, too often, like 

 him into an untimely grave, sustained only by an undy- 

 ing and sleepless love of truth, coupled with a desire to 

 leave the world better for having lived in it. To his stu- 

 dents he said, " It must not discourage us, that the pro- 

 cess of microscopic examination is a slow and laborious 

 one, and the results of one life-time after all very small' - 

 In one of his lectures on classification of animals he says, 

 " In one instance I had an ovarian egg of a white fish for 

 sixty-three consecutive days, daily for several hours under 

 the microscope, following without interruption all its 

 changes till the fish was hatched." Is it anv wonder 

 that he died with a mortgage on his house ? Think of 

 such a man, with such an eye, and such a brain behind 

 it, watching a minute fish egg through a microscope for 

 over two months — long enough time to have made forty 

 able political speeches. Such men are driven to their 

 work by a quenchless thirst for knowledge almost incom- 

 prehensible to ordinary mortals. Most of us are content 

 to think with Dean Swift that a flea 



Has smaller fleas that on him pre}': 

 And these have smaller still to bite 'em. 

 And so proceed ad infinitum. 



We take our knowledge of natural history, microscopy and 

 the underworld at second hand, but Agassiz saw gran- 



