Williams : Louis Agassiz. 



3 



sequently adhered. Though this work gained for him great credit, 

 his father still disliked his exclusive devotion to science, and his dis- 

 like took the very practical but uncomfortable and impoverishing form 

 of refusing to continue Agassiz's allowance. His enthusiasm won 

 the heart of a bookseller, who enabled him to convert fishes to other 

 purposes than those of study. Another friend also provided him with 

 a purse, by the aid of which he visited Paris, where he gained the 

 friendship of Cuvier and Humboldt,^ with the former of whom he 

 remained until Cuvier's death, in 1832. 



On his return to Switzerland he was appointed Professor of Natural 

 History in the University of N'eufchatel — a position which he filled until 

 his departure for the United States. In 1833 he published, with the gen- 

 erous aid of Humboldt, a great work, Researches on Fossil Fishes, in five 

 volumes, with an atlas of about 400 hundred folio plates, and comprising 

 descriptions and figures of nearly a thousand species of fossil fishes. ^ 

 This work gained for him the respect of the whole scientific world, 

 and, at the age of thirty-four, Agassiz was a member of nearly every 



1 "Writing from Berlin, on 9th May, 1858, to Mr. George Ticknor, of Boston, 

 Humboldt refers to Vols. I. and II. of Agassiz's Natural History of the United 

 States, published in 1857 : — "The great and beautiful work of Agassiz (the first two 

 volumes) reached me only a few days since. It will produce a great effect by the 

 breadth of its general views, and by the extreme sagacity of its special embryological 

 observations." Humboldt speaks also of Agassiz as "this illustrious life, who is 

 no less a man of a constant and beautiful nature." Ticknor's Life, Letters, and 

 Journals, Vol. II., p. 338. 



1 may add that Vol. I. of this Natural History of the United States consists (1) 

 of an elaborate Essay on Classification, and (2) of the application of the 

 principles of Classification to the American turtles. Vol. II. treats of the develop- 

 ment of the turtle's egg, from its first appearance to the time of hatching. The 

 exceeding minuteness of the history may be inferred from the fact that it occupies 

 one hundred and seventy quarto j)ages of compressed details of the successive 

 changes in each part of the young creature's frame, from the moment of the first 

 hint towards its formation. It teaches a lesson of thoroughness and patience 

 which it would be well for all students to ponder. The develoiwnent of one egg, 

 studied with such care, and described with such accuracy, as to require one hundred 

 and seventy quarto pages for the description ! Nor is the work that of simple 

 observation and record. It displays an immense amount of patient, instructive 

 reasoning. 



2 Agassiz found it necessary to adopt a different system from that generally in 

 use among zoologists, as, in many instances, the organs upon which the latter relied 

 for the characters of their groups were absent or unrecognisable in the remains of 

 fishes of former ages. Under these circumstances he derived the leading characters 

 for his general classification of fishes from the form and structure of the scales, or 

 dermal appendages, these organs being generally well preserved in fossil specimens ; 

 and this has undoubtedly been of great service in the study of fossil Iclithyology. 

 It cannot be doubted, hov/ever, that, as is always the case where the structure of 

 a single system of organs is adopted as the basis of classification, the arrangement 

 of fishes proposed by Agassiz is evidently artificial, and often violates the natural 

 affinities of the animals, removing closely allied species to a distance from each other, 

 and bringing others into close juxtaposition which have nothing in common but the 

 general form of their scales. For this reason the system has only been partially 

 adopted by succeeding naturalists, although it is admitted on all hands to have been 

 of great service in facilitating the study of fossil fishes. Perhaps the most 

 important zoological j)oint in the work of Agassiz is the establishment of the 

 Ganoidea as a distinct order. 



