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Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching in our community was prompt and decisive, all the more so that it struck people's imagination by its very excess. The good old way of committing printed abstractions to memory seems never to have received such a shock as it encountered at his hands.
It may be added here as an evidence of Agassiz's faith in the institutions of the United States and in her intellectual progress that he was himself naturalized in the darkest hour of the war, when the final disruption of the country was confidently prophesied by her enemies.
Under Agassiz's new style of housekeeping the coffee is made in a machine which is devoted during the day to the soaking of all sorts of creatures for skeletons, and in the evening again to the brewing of our tea. At eight o'clock comes the clinical lecture of Ringseis.
And so, perhaps, of the other prophetic types. Here type and antitype correspond. If these are true prophecies, we need not wonder that some who read them in Agassiz's book will read their fulfilment in Darwin's. Why is this, but that the link of generation has been sundered?
The titanotheres, or brontotheridae, for example, a gigantic tribe, offshoots of the same stock which produced the horse and rhinoceros, represented the culmination of a line of descent. They developed rapidly in a geological sense, and flourished about the middle of the tertiary period; then, to use Agassiz's phrase," time fought against them."
During the same summer Mrs. Buckland writes from Interlaken, in the course of a journey in Switzerland with her husband. . ."We have made a good tour of the Oberland and have seen glaciers, etc., but Dr. Buckland is as far as ever from agreeing with you." We shall see hereafter how completely he became a convert to Agassiz's glacial theory in its widest acceptation.
Too well we know it, we who in happy Cambridge childhood often gathered, almost within a stone's throw of Professor Agassiz's new Museum, the arethusa and the gentian, the cardinal-flower and the gaudy rhexia, we who remember the last secret hiding-place of the rhodora in West Cambridge, of the yellow violet and the Viola debilis in Watertown, of the Convallaria trifolia near Fresh Pond, of the Hottonia beyond Wellington's Hill, of the Cornus florida in West Roxbury, of the Clintonia and the dwarf ginseng in Brookline, we who have found in its one chosen nook the sacred Andromeda polyfolia of Linnaeus.
I was Agassiz's boatman on demand, for while all the others had their personal guides and attendants, I was his; but often when Emerson wanted a boat I managed to provide for Agassiz with one of the unoccupied guides, and take the place of Emerson's own guide. Thus Emerson and I had many hours alone on the lake and in the wood.
At Tiedemann's lecture the next day Agassiz's attention was attracted by a young man who sat next him, and who was taking very careful notes and illustrating them. There was something very winning in his calm, gentle face, full of benevolence and intelligence.
Under the same head is an interesting essay upon Glaciers, with figures, one of which is a reduced copy of a sketch in Agassiz's great work, representing the Glacier of Zermatt, in the Monte-Rosa region. Under the head of Heat as an Agent, we have, as might be expected, interesting and valuable matter upon volcanic phenomena, and those of metamorphism.
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