Agasstz at Harvard. 



103 



him, though every moment had its duties. It was 

 during his stay in Charleston that he received the 

 Cuvier prize, also the letter from his proud mother, 

 in which she wrote : Your fossil fishes, which have 

 cost you so much anxiety, so much toil, so many 

 sacrifices, have now been estimated at their true 

 value by the most eminent judges. . . . This 

 has given me such happiness, dear Louis, that the 

 tears are in my eyes as I write it to you.'* 



France became jealous of America in the posses- 

 sion of Agassiz, and the Emperor Napoleon offered 

 him a position that would have attracted the ordi- 

 nary man, the highest scientific office in his gift, also 

 intimating that as a citizen of France it was not ex- 

 actly the right thing for him to give the benefits of 

 his mind to a foreign country. To this Agassiz re- 

 plied, that he was not a citizen of France and that 

 his family owed nothing to it but exile and poverty ; 

 and that he prized more highly the spontaneous 

 gratitude and gifts of a free people than the patron- 

 age of emperors and the formal regard of nobles.*' 



The influence of Agassiz had now permeated 

 every portion of the United States and everywhere 

 his methods were accepted and followed. He was 

 an indefatigable collector in America as he had been 

 in Europe, and in 1855 he had accumulated speci- 

 mens covering almost every field in natural history. 

 The museum which was so needed at Cambridge 

 was ever in his mind, and his desire was to make it 

 not merely a display of animals but instructive in 

 its very arrangement. He had constant fear for his 

 treasures, which were stored in Cambridge in an old 



