No. 375.] LOUIS AGASSIZ. 149 
ing ; even rooms for his classes were with difficulty obtained. 
Yet he soon built up a most flourishing school of natural 
history. Out of his limited salary he supported collectors, 
assistants, artists, and secretaries. He went farther and 
became his own publisher and started a large lithographic 
establishment, the chief business of which was to furnish 
illustrations, in a style until then never seen, for the rapidly 
increasing series of works turned out from the busy hive. 
The school at Neuchatel was not a university, but Agassiz 
made it one of the scientific centres of the world. To it came 
visitors and students from all parts of Europe. That its 
prominence at this time was due solely to Agassiz is shown 
by the fact that when he left for the United States the acad- 
emy at once sank back to its former inconspicuous condition, 
just as Upsala did when Linné died. 
While here at Neuchatel, pushing along the work on the 
fishes of central Europe, the fossil fishes, and the fossil echino- 
derms of the Jura, he became interested in the glaciers. To 
others we owe the discovery that glaciers move, and that in 
former times they covered more of Switzerland than they do 
to-day. At first Agassiz had little sympathy with such ideas, 
but as he studied the phenomena in the valley of the Rhone 
he was converted to the new views, and soon became the fore- 
most authority in all that pertains to glaciers. Even were we 
to allow to Forbes and Schimper all that they claim, still it 
would be to Agassiz that we owe the systematization of the 
facts and the acceptance of the principles involved by the 
scientific world. As the work left Agassiz’s hands it was 
about as complete as it could be without a knowledge of 
physical methods and phenomena such as Agassiz never 
claimed to have. Later Tyndall built upon Agassiz’s founda- 
tion the glacial theory of to-day, rounding it out on the 
physical side and making it complete. 
Each summer during these glacial studies was spent upon 
some of the glaciers of the Alps, where regular investigations 
of the most elaborate kind were carried on with the best 
of instruments, the Glacier of the Aar being the one the most 
thoroughly investigated. During the rest of the year Agassiz 
