﻿130 



Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 



On May 28, 1807, in the parish of Mottier, Canton of Freyburg, 

 Switzerland, was born Louis Jean Rodolph Agassiz, whose name 

 has become a household word in the land of his adoption. He 

 was born, unheralded and unsung of man. No horoscope with 

 red-fronted Mars, or flashing meteor, or blazing comet, had been 

 cast by prophetic seer. He came as the rising of a silent star on 

 a quiet night. His advent was in the glad springtime, with the 

 opening of the leaves, with the budding of the flowers, with the 

 love season of the birds ; and stars of the smallest magnitude 

 crowded their glad faces into the merry brook that went singing 

 by the cot that gave him birth. 



Having been invited by your Committee to offer a slight tribute 

 to his memory, on this, his natal day, my only regret is that my 

 ability is not more commensurate with my regard and veneration 

 for his name and works. 



I will, therefore, merely present a brief account of his fruitful life, 

 which I deem a more fitting eulogy than the most brilliant panegyric 

 that can be offered ; and if I fail to do justice to, or even to men- 

 tion, some of his achievements in the world of science, I trust you 

 will bear with me patiently, for my remarks will be confined 

 wholly within the province of the angler. And, as an angler, I 

 take great pleasure in indulging in the fancy that, in all proba- 

 bility, the world is indebted, chiefly, to the love of angling acquired 

 in his boyhood, for his wonderful scientific labors — labors of love, 

 indeed, with him. 



Born under the shadows of the snow-capped Alps, his lullaby 

 the rushing mountain torrent, he was reared amid the grandest, 

 wildest and most sublime features of Nature's handiwork. His 

 early education was conducted by that best of all teachers — his 

 mother, a very intelligent and accomplished woman, the daughter 

 of a physician of the Canton de Vaud. Through all of his after 

 years, the early influences of a mother's love and guidance were 

 strongly apparent. 



At the age of eleven he was stent, with a younger brother, to a 

 school at Bienne, in the Canton of Berne, where, tor four years, he 

 studied ancient and modern languages, "diversified," says one ac- 

 count, "by the amusements of fishing and collecting insects." 



