flung himself into any and every enterprise by which he could quicken 

 the life of the common schools, and in forty different ways he created 

 a new class of men and women. Naturalists showed themselves on 

 the right hand and on the left. I have seen him address an audience 

 of five hundred people, not twenty of whom when they entered the hall 

 thought they had anything to do with the study of Nature. And when 

 after his address they left the hall, all of the five hundred were deter- 

 mined to keep their eyes open and to study Nature as she is. From 

 that year 1848, you may trace a steady advance in Nature Study in the 

 New England schools. 



That is to say, that his distinction is that of an educator quite as 

 much as it is that of a naturalist. In 1888, Lowell said, in his quater- 

 millennial address at Harvard College, that the College had trained no 

 great educator, "for we imported Agassiz." A great educator he 

 truly was. 



When Agassiz was appointed Professor he was forty-one years old. 

 In my first personal conversation with him he told me a story which 

 may not have got into print, of his own physical strength. He spoke 

 as if it were then an old experience to him. Whether he were twenty- 

 five or thirty-five when it happened, it shows how admirable was his 

 training and his physical constitution. He had been with a party of 

 friends somewhere in eastern Switzerland. They were travelling in 

 their carriages; he was on foot. They parted with the understanding 

 that they were to meet in the Tyrol, at the city of Innsbruck. Accord- 

 ingly the next morning, Agassiz rose early and started through the 

 mountains by this valley and that, as the compass might direct or his 

 previous knowledge of the region. He did not mean to stop for study 

 and they did not. But he had no special plan as to which hamlet or 

 cottage should cover him at night. Before sundown he came in sight of 

 a larger town than he expected to see, in the distance, and calling a 

 mountaineer, he asked him what that place was. The man said it was 

 Innsbruck. Agassiz said that that could not be so. The man replied 

 with a jeer that he had lived there twenty years, and had always been 

 told that that was the name of the place, but he supposed Agassiz knew 

 better than he did. Accordingly Agassiz determined that he would 

 sleep there and did so. The distance was somewhere near seventy 

 miles. I know it gave me the impression of a walk through the valley 

 passes at the rate of four miles an hour, for sixteen or seventeen hours. 



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