synthesized and spoke, for all men, of all countries, and 

 all time. He united the philanthropist and the philoso- 

 pher in that he devoted his great ability with marvelous 

 industry to the education of the people. Most original 

 thinkers require translators. They need to be interpreted 

 to the common mind. Generations pass away before their 

 ideas, discoveries, results, reach the people. Great truths 

 have thus often lain locked up in technical or learned lan- 

 guages waiting for that most useful class, the middle men. 

 Often, too, the interpreter has required to be interpreted, 

 and the process has needed repetition many times 

 before the mind of the first great original thinker 

 reached that of the masses. Just as in recent years, archae- 

 ologists and philologists have been forced to reach the 

 forgotten Zend, Vedic and Cuneiform through several lan- 

 guages in different stages of vitalitv between the living 

 tongue and the rock entombed dialects of distant ages. 

 Agassiz was his own interpreter, and delighted to be so. 

 He never tired in elucidating and explaining to popular 

 comprehension facts and processes in science His facul- 

 ty that way, almost as rare as that of original research, 

 was remarkable. His lectures are models of clearness 

 when delivered to non-scientific audiences and the nature 

 of the subject made popular terms possible, needing noth- 

 ing of the varnish and veneer of scholarship to create in- 

 terest or secure attention. In this consists one of his 

 greatest excellencies. His thought comes to the people 

 fresh and hot from the brain that elaborated it. It waits 

 not for the next century for its effect. It needed not, like 

 some of the embryos he so astonishingly investigated, to 

 wait for a process of alternate generation, and to appear 

 in many dissimilar puzzling forms before bursting into full 

 and final development. In one of his books Agassiz ex- 

 plains to us cases in which, as he says, " the offspring not 

 only do not resemble the parent at birth, but remain dif- 

 ferent during their whole life, so that their relationship is 

 not apparent until a succeeding generation. The son does 

 not resemble the father, but the grandfather ; and in some 

 cases the resemblance re-appears onlv at the fourth or 



