XXIV 



was forced to give his lectures in the Town Hall ; but in spite of defective 

 appliances he soon raised his subject to the first rank among those taught 

 in the Gymnasium. He sent for all the specimens he had collected in 

 Grermany, constantly added new ones, and by-and-by had a large collection 

 for use. He worked hard at original investigations, constantly employing 

 two artists, Weber and Dinkel, and a painter, Jacques Burkhardt, an old 

 fellow-student at Munich, who became his life-long friend and companion. 

 Stahl, afterwards known as the best modeller at the Jardin des Plantes, 

 was then employed at Xeuf chatel ; Hercule Mcolet was persuaded to set 

 up there a large lithographic establishment, where were published the last 

 plates of the ' Poissons Eossiles,' those of the ' Poissons d'eau douce,' of 

 the embryology of Coregonus, of the works on the Glaciers, and of the 

 Echinoderms. 



In 1832, the Societe des Sciences Naturelles a J^^'eufchatel, of which the 

 " Little Academy " at Munich may be said to have been the germ, was 

 founded. The first meeting was held in December, when Louis Coulon 

 was chosen as President and Agassiz as Secretary of the X atural-History 

 Section. 



Agassiz held his professorship at Neuf chatel f rom 1832 imtil 1846, and 

 during that period got through an enormous amount of work. His work 

 for Martins had led him into palgeontology ; and the result of his exten- 

 sive study of fossil fishes was the discovery that the scales of fishes 

 correspond by four kinds of structure to four large natural divisions, 

 which he called Ganoids, Placoids, Cycloids, and Ctenoids. With this 

 basis and with the aid of his intimate knowledge of the skeleton he 

 was enabled to tabulate all the known fossil species to the number 

 of 1000, and these results he published as 'Eecherches sur les Poissons 

 Possiles,' in 5 vols., with about 100 excellent plates. This work occupied 

 ten years in going through the press. It contains the germs of many of 

 the theories he subsequently advocated so zealously in his public lectures. 

 In the preface is found the first notice of his theorv of the correspond- 

 ence between geological succession and embryological development. 



The preparation of this book involved an immense amount of work. 

 He had to travel with an artist in order to examine and copy the speci- 

 mens which could not be sent to Xeufchatel. The expense also was so 

 far beyond his means, that he incurred heavy debts which hampered him 

 for many years. They were not discharged until he had spent many 

 years in the United States, travelling from place to place, giving public 

 lectures on Xatural History. At last, finding that this constant travelling 

 interfered too much with his duties at Harvard, he established at Cam- 

 bridge a school for young ladies, he himself teaching botany, physiology, 

 and geology. This proved eminently successful, and reheved him from 

 all his embarrassments. 



After the publication of his work on ' Poissons Fossiles ' he came to Eng- 

 land to study the fossils of this country, and in 1844 published an 



