174 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST.  [Vou. XXXII. 
worthy fruits of Agassiz’s professorship in Neuchatel. Those 
on the Salmonidz treated largely of problems of development, 
at once most difficult and most interesting. Others took up the 
classification of the complicated family of Cyprinidz (carp, 
chubs, dace, and minnows), with an attempt to divide the 
group into genera founded on natural — that is, anatomical — 
characters. 
Similar attempts were made at about the same time by John 
J. Heckel and by Charles Lucien Bonaparte with much the 
same results. On the whole, Agassiz’s work was the more suc- 
cessful as well as earlier in time. 
_ For a number of years the fossil fishes and the glaciers 
occupied most of Agassiz’s scientific activity. 
In 1846 he came to America, accepting a chair in Harvard 
College, and was soon engaged in exploring the natural products 
of the New World, to which he “came in the spirit of adventure 
and curiosity,” and in which he stayed “because he liked the 
land where he could think and act as he pleased; the land where 
nature was rich, while tools and workmen were few, and tradi- 
tions none.” 
In America he soon renewed his interest in the fishes. In 
1850 he published his volume on Lake Superior, which contained 
among other things an account of the fishes collected by himself 
and his students in a summer’s trip of exploration. 
In this volume, which is accompanied by excellent stone 
engravings, we see more of Agassiz’s tendency to philosophic 
discussion. A remarkable new species, Percopsis, the type of 
a new family of ancient lineage, suggests to him many thoughts 
as to the succession of forms among fishes, though he was still 
unprepared to see in this a genetic relation. The descriptions 
of species in this book are very detailed, but not at all critical. 
They seem like the work of students, as they doubtless were, 
for whoever was in Agassiz’s company was always set to work 
along the line of his thoughts. Agassiz’s own best work was 
not in the line of description, but rather in suggéstion. He 
had a keen eye for generalization, as for comparison and clas- 
sification. His later papers on fishes were of the nature of 
syllabi and suggestions rather than of finished work, but they 
