He would not be a hero even to his own valet, if he 

 ever had one. With the fishermen who brought him rare 

 shells and odd fish, the farmers who consulted him about 

 stock breeding, the puzzled, amateur naturalists who 

 besought him for explanations, the thoughtless students 

 who wanted hours of his precious time for elementary 

 matters in science, he was always the kind-hearted help- 

 er, adviser, friend, knowing, as has been said of him, ab- 

 solutely nothing of social distinction, and only earnest for 

 the advancement of science and the spread of knowledge. 

 His hold upon the popular heart was in great part due to 

 these traits. All saw that he was not of that sort of men 



whose visages 

 Do cream and mantel like a standing pond, 

 With purpose to be dressed in an opinion 

 Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit. 



He was accessible to all, and in that most admirably 

 adapted to the great work of popularizing science. He 

 was in no sense Sir Oracle ; no pompous pedant airing his 

 erudition ; no frigid patrician shunning the common 

 people, but an honest, great-hearted son of the Huguenots, 

 a Swiss republican, loving the larger liberty and wider 

 field of America. To this was due his ability, as Beecher 

 says, to make straight the path of Tyndall, to create the 

 demand for Huxley's lectures, and to lay the " corner- 

 stone of our institutes of technology and scientific schools." 



A marked feature of our time is the effort to popu- 

 larize science. The activity displayed in it, the sudden 

 awakening to its importance, the zeal evinced in transla- 

 ting to popular comprehension the abstrusest inductions, 

 is almost as notable as the rise of criticism and the revi- 

 val of learning in the sixteenth century. 



Without disparagement of Gray, Youmans, Winchell, 

 Mitchell and others, it is but justice to say that Agassiz 

 has almost alone revolutionized public sentiment and prac- 

 tice in the teaching of science, and in popularizing it. 

 The marked and eager interest of the general public in 

 scientific subjects is in great part due to him. He worked 

 and thought, observed and wrote, analyzed and lectured, 



