826 The American Geologist. May, 1896 
The biography hero published more than twenty years after his death,. 
by the only survivor of the band of Franco-Swiss naturalists, Agassiz, 
Guyot, Lesquereux, and Marcou, who came to America at nearly the 
same time, deals chiefly with the scientific work, associations, friends 
and critics of Agassiz, with free and hearty praise and blame by the au- 
thor himself. On the other hand, the reader must be referred to the 
biography by Mrs. Agassiz, to learn most fully the personal and social 
traits which endeared Agassiz to his wide circle of friends, to the com- 
mon people, and especially to his pupils, who rarely failed to acquire an 
enduring enthusiasm for the natural sciences. 
One of the conspicuous elements of the character of Agassiz, by 
which in his later years he was hindered and handicapped, namely, a 
strong reluctance to confess that opinions which he once had published 
were afterward found to be erroneous, Marcou believes to have been de- 
rived largely from the same disposition of Cuvier, with whom Agassiz 
had been intimately associated in his early years. Although the studies 
and discoveries of Agassiz in zoologic classification and in embryology 
gave the most convincing arguments, in the opinions of others and of 
nearly all his pupils, for the doctrine of organic evolution, as set forth 
by Darwin, this new light on the faunas and floras which Agassiz and 
Gray studied was not recognized by the former, while it was welcomed 
and advanced by the latter. On this subject, however, the biographer 
upholds Agassiz in his dissent against the origin of species by gradual 
evolution, so that some readers may wrongly infer that the question is 
still under discussion among biologists and geologists. 
The boulder from the Aar glacier, which marks the grave of Agassiz, 
is shown in two views from photographs. More truly, and with equally 
peculiar fitness, his chief monument is the extensive Museum of Com- 
parative Zoology which he founded at Harvard University. Again, in 
a most appropriate sense, another monument to his memory is the ap- 
plication of his name to the glacial lake Agassiz, the grandest of many 
belonging to its class in the Late Pleistocene history of our continent. 
These volumes are a noble tribute to Agassiz by his friend. Appen- 
dixes note his many other biographies or sketches, mostly pamphlets or 
chapters or parts in larger works, his portraits, busts, medals, and tab- 
lets, and a complete bibliography of his writings. w. u. 
A preglacial tributary to Paint creek and its relation to the Beech 
Hats of Pike county, Ohio. By W. G. Tight. (Bulletin of the Scien- 
tific Laboratories of Denison University, vol. ix, pp. 25-34, with map : 
Granville, O., Dec, 1895.) The large level tract called Beech Flats, 
which Prof. G. F. Wright has considered to be valley drift and alluvium 
deposited during the existence of a lake held by the barrier of the ice- 
sheet crossing the Ohio river at Cincinnati, is found to be an expanse 
of till or unmodified glacial drift, forming a part of the widely spread 
ground moraine. w. u. 
Studies of Melonites Midtiporvs. By Robert Tracy Jackson and 
Thomas Augustus Jaggar. Jr. (Bull. Geol. Soc. America, vol. vu, pp. 
