I 78 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [VoL XXXII. 
The circumstances which led Agassiz to enter upon the study 
of paleichthyology were largely fortuitous. When a student at 
Heidelberg, being then scarcely twenty years of age, he attended 
a course of lectures on paleontology by Professor Bronn, a 
teacher of profound erudition, and for whom he always enter- 
tained feelings of the warmest regard. The first portions of 
Goldfuss’s great work, Petrefacta Germaniae, were then just 
issuing from the press, and awakened a sensational interest in 
geology and paleontology. The highly fossiliferous rocks of 
southern Germany were eagerly searched by collectors, and 
large gatherings found their way into the principal museums. 
Munich in particular became the repository of those exquisitely | 
preserved remains which have made the name of Solenhofen 
famous in the annals of paleontology for all time. And thither, 
to Munich, Agassiz came before he was twenty-one, yet not. 
without having made the acquaintance of almost every large- 
sized collection in the land. To use his own words, as given in 
a brief account of his university life, «I knew every animal, 
living and fossil, in the Museums of Munich, Stuttgart, 
Tübingen, Erlangen, Würzburg, Carlsruhe, Heidelberg, and 
Frankfort.” 1 
The project of preparing a general work on fossil ichthyology 
seems to have first taken shape in his mind while a student at 
Heidelberg; its feasibility was impressed upon him after an 
examination of the above-mentioned collections, and on receiving 
numerous friendly offers for the loan of specimens; and its 
initiation dates from the period of his removal to Munich, if we 
may judge from a letter written to his brother in January, 1830, 
from which we quote as follows: 
Having by permission of the Director of the Museum one of the finest 
collections of fossils in Germany at my disposition, and being also allowed 
to take the specimens home as I need them, I have undertaken to publish 
the ichthyological part of the collection. Nowhere so well as here, where 
the Academy of Fine Arts brings together so many draughtsmen, could I 
have the same facility for completing a similar work; and as it is an entirely 
1 Louis Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence, by E. C. Agassiz. Boston, 1885. 
Vol. i, p. 157. On the growth of some of these institutions and the influence of 
Bronn and others, see an article by K. A. von Zittel, in American Geologist, vol. 
xiv, 1894, pp. 179-185. 
