Williams : Louis Agassiz. 



31 



Elizabeth islands north of New York, with funds to establish there a 

 Marine Naturalists' School. The last year of Agassiz's life was spent 

 chiefly on this island, training up a group of young naturalists. When 

 he died he left both hemispheres, wherever science is honoured, in 

 mourning ; and he left behind him a name with no soil upon it to 

 stain its honour, and the reputation of one who in every relation of 

 life had nobly and purely done his part — who, as husband, parent, 

 citizen, philosopher, was blameless among men. 



To give any really intelligible account of Agassiz's enormous labours 

 through his lifetime would require the compass of a good-sized 

 treatise. I must content myseK with the remark that he worked 

 with a definite aim, and that his studies were undertaken with 

 reference to some general question, and made a test of the value and 

 soundness of some general principle. " The papers and works upon 

 echinoderms aimed at a classification of these animals, and a better 

 appreciation of their structural differences from the other types. The 

 monographs upon shells, living and fossil, were prepared with a view 

 of testing the range of distribution of species in past ages, and the 

 limits of their special characters. The researches on fossil fishes are 

 intended to show the relations of living and fossil species, and their 

 embryonic development in one of the most extensive classes of the 

 animal kingdom, the existence of which upon earth may be traced 

 back to the earliest periods in which animal life was called into being. 

 The investigations upon the glaciers were called forth by a desire to 

 connect the history of the physical changes our globe has undergone 

 with the phenomena exhibited by the developments of the organic 

 kingdom.." Everywhere in his works we discover a tendency to the 

 most extensive generalisations ; while in every instance the knowledge 

 of the facts, a candid study of the most minute relations of his 

 subjects, was his constant aim in all his investigations. It is true that 

 some of his generalisations are now of little interest. For instance, in 

 his time naturalists and theologians were in a heated discussion on 

 the unity of the human race. The doctrine of the immutability of 

 species was pushed by some to such an extreme that they declared it 

 incredible that the different races of men could have descended from 

 a single pair. Agassiz was an advocate of this view, maintaining that 

 the human race had had, in its several distinct types, separate stocks 

 of originality, both as to time and place ; and to his own generation 

 his own name was a terror to orthodox interpreters of the Bible. Even 

 in 1872 Dr. Charles Hodge made the assertion that the unity of the 

 human race is denied by "a large and increasing class of scientific 



