examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.

Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to
bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced
even a conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs.
Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story
which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and
demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a
certain group of fossil fishes?" "Yes, yes!" "Well, I have just been
reading------'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least
truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in
relinquishing his error.

I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side,
of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many. I recall a dinner
at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California,
and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual
scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological "Society upon
the Stanislow." He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly
pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself
thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that
delicious poem.

Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other
end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their
difference of temperament. The one was all philosophical and the other
all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be
said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in
matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it. He was ancestrally