No. 375.] PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS OF AGASSIZ. 161 
mantled in ice, and that there had been a great ice age in that 
part of the earth. If he was a philosopher, he was not less a 
man of the world, a skillful and ready debater, a hard hitter in 
controversy, a persuasive and silver-tongued orator; and thus 
equipped, he overcame the prejudices of the geologists of that 
day, who were then wedded to diluvial currents, debacles, as 
well as impossible subsidences; and before his advent to these 
shores, he had convinced the scientific world that the greater 
part of the eastern hemisphere had been ice clad. Always 
observing and comparing, when he landed at Halifax and jour- 
neyed to Boston, afterwards geologizing in the White, Green, 
and Adirondack Mountains and about Lake Superior, he firmly 
established the truth of a general glacial period. And it is 
rather interesting to note that while the universality of the 
Darwinian theory of the formation of atolls by subsidence is 
now very generally called in question, and the adequacy of the 
theory of natural selection as a vera causa, or at least a primary 
factor, in evolution is denied by such a philosopher as Herbert 
Spencer, and by many evolutionists, the glacial theory is 
universally held, its opponents being so few that we can count 
them on the fingers of one hand. 
When, however, we consider Agassiz as a zoologist or a 
biologist, and remember the determined way in which he 
opposed the doctrine of evolution in pre-Darwinian days, 
attacking on every occasion Lamarckism and the views of the 
Vestiges of Creation, and after the publication of the Origin of 
Species, letting no opportunity be lost in combating its supposed 
heretical views, we might be led to say, as has been said, that, 
after all, Agassiz was no philosopher; that he was slightly 
fanatical and somewhat bigoted and set in his views and illogi- 
cal in his methods, It is true that in his prime and after a 
lifelong work in teaching the facts and principles which under- 
lie and form the foundation on which the doctrine of evolution 
rests, he illogically stopped short of obvious and natural conclu- 
sions, and, unlike Lyell, Dana, and others, failed to adopt the 
new views. 
The causes of his failure to come into line with the new 
zoology were in part, perhaps, the result of theological preju- 
