164 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
with teeth, and of Tertiary mammals connecting widely sepa- 
rated existing orders.” And then, with a few more words, 
which we do not distinctly remember, we separated. Not a 
sign of displeasure during that August afternoon disturbed the 
genial and sweet nature of the great naturalist. He was not 
then, though occasionally so, dogmatic. The touch of bigotry, 
if we may use so strong a word, which existed in his, as it does 
in many an intense, eager, clear-minded spirit, did not then 
crop out, and it was one of the most delightful moments we 
ever spent with that eminently lovable man. Agassiz had then 
just passed his sixty-sixth year; and, after having for years 
combated the principle of evolution raised by Lamarck and by 
the author’ of the Vestiges of Creation, he did not, unlike his 
contemporaries Lyell, Wyman, W. B. Rogers, and others, 
change his views. 
And so it is, in youth the older naturalists of the present 
generation were taught the doctrine of creation by sudden, 
cataclysmic, mechanical, “ creative’’ acts; and those to whose 
lot it fell to come in contact with the ultimate facts and prin- 
ciples of the new biology had to unlearn this view, and grad- 
ually to work out a larger, more profound, wider-reaching, and 
more philosophic conception of creation. 
