30 



The Naturalist. 



John, geologists j Mr. John A. Allen, ornithologist ; and Mr. George 

 Sceva, preparator of specimens. 



The results of this celebrated expedition are described by Agassiz 

 and his wife in the charming work entitled A Journey in Brazil. 

 Agassiz justly remarked that they served to show " that their year, 

 full as it was of enjoyment for all the party, was also rich in perma- 

 nent results for science."* After this voyage Agassiz devoted a large 

 share of his time to the examination of the immense Brazilian 

 collections stored in the Museum at Cambridge. Before long, how- 

 ever, his health began to show signs of failing him again, and the 

 work of examination proceeded more slowly than he had hoped and 

 anticipated. His scientific activity, however, was not over. He took 

 a part in the great controversies of the day, gave a series of lectures 

 in New York on the Geology of the American Continent, and in the 

 summer of 1871 joined an exploring expedition to the South Atlantic 

 and Pacific shores of the Continent. A careful exploration was made 

 of the celebrated Sargasso sea, and a nest-building fish was discovered 

 in that vast bed of oceanic vegetation \ and other important contribu- 

 tions were made to natural science. A course of lectures on " The 

 Method of Creation" afforded him the opportunity of stating his 

 decided objections to Mr. Darwin's theory of Natural Selection, and 

 of propounding his own view that species do not insensibly pass into 

 each other, but that each has its own appointed period, and is not 

 connected, except in the order of time, with its predecessor. His 

 career closed unexpectedly in 1874, among a people whose love he 

 won by his warm-hearted, earnest, and active nature. Abundant were 

 the proofs of their full appreciation of him, in the liberality of Mr. 

 Abbott Lawrence and of Mr. Thayer ; and to these were added, in 

 1873 — a year before his decease — the gift by Mr. Anderson, a rich 

 tobacco merchant of New York, of the island of Penikese, one of the 



4 Agassiz was constantly sending to the Cambridge Museum such vast and 

 apparently endless numbers of specimens from Brazil that one of the trustees, and 

 Agassiz' s most intimate personal friend, Mr. George Ticknor, wrote, in January, 

 1866, beseeching him to desist, as "it would not be j)ossible to erect all the 

 buildings and provide all the scientific service, attendance, and materials necessary 

 to protect and maintain in good condition such masses of specimens, and make 

 them intelligible and useful." Besides, the collections were already much larger 

 than Agassiz could submit to such investigations as he intended to make, even 

 should he live to a fabulous age ! Further, says Mr. Ticknor, " ihose who know best 

 assure me that the time you are now giving to the accumulation of specimens — 

 which may, after all, perish for the want of the means needful to protect them— 

 might, in their judgment, be better employed for your own fame, and for the 

 advancement of such scientific investigations as you can make better than any man 

 alive, and without which these same vast collections might as well remain in 

 their blind kegs, in the dark cellar where they are hidden away, and so your vast 

 personal labours and disinterested sacrifices, in bringing them together, be mainly 

 lost."— TMnor's Lije, Vol. II., pp. 386-87. 



