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To my question one day as to his conclusions, he replied, with a caution characteristic of the man and very unlike the resolute attitude of Agassiz before the question which the Sphinx proposes still, "An evolution of some sort there certainly was," but nothing more would he say.
He published little, but he seems to have been the founder of modern embryological investigation, and to have initiated his two famous pupils, first Von Baer, and then Agassiz, into at least the rudiments of the doctrine of the correspondence between the stages of the development of the individual animal with that of its rank in the scale of being, and the succession in geological time of the forms and types to which the species belongs: a principle very fertile for scientific zoölogy in the hands of both these naturalists, and one of the foundations of that theory of evolution which the former, we believe, partially accepted, and the other wholly rejected.
This in itself was a great good fortune; even greater was the fact that his new life brought him into immediate contact with a scholar of great genius and lovableness. Someone has said that America has produced four scholars of the very first rank Agassiz in natural science, Whitney in philology, Willard Gibbs in physics, and Gildersleeve in Greek.
Before Agassiz came I was obliged to make my excursions almost always alone, and to study in hermit-like isolation. After all, two people working together can accomplish far more than either one can do alone.
In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun., John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons, Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James Pierce, Dr.
There are few of us left who can remember the sudden shadow that fell on our community at his unexpected death, and the universal grief that told of the hold he had on the entire nation; and the mourning extended far beyond the circle of personal acquaintance with Agassiz.
The events of yesterday were part of that general plan on which the world was first formed and on which it may have been conducted through all the hundreds of centuries which puzzle Agassiz and frighten the theologists.
Onchus tenuistriatus, Agassiz. Bone-bed. Upper Silurian. Shagreen-scales of a placoid fish, Thelodus parvidens, Agassiz. Plectrodus mirabilis, Agassiz.
Judging by his hat, as Professor Agassiz judges of fish by their scales, he must have been forty feet high, by about ten or fifteen broad; and if his strength corresponded with his gigantic proportions, I fancy he could have knocked the gable-end off a house with a single blow of his fist, or kicked the head out of a puncheon of rum, and swallowed the contents at a single draught, without the least difficulty.
Not only did they go to him daily, but he also came often to see them, bringing botanical specimens to Braun, or looking in upon Agassiz's breeding experiments, in which he took the liveliest interest, being always ready with advice or practical aid. The fact that Agassiz and Braun had their room in his house made intercourse with him especially easy.
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