study, and his parents, who for the first ten years of his life
were his only teachers, were too wise to stimulate his mind beyond
the ordinary attainments of his age. having lost her first four
children in infancy, his mother watched with trembling solicitude
over his early years. It was perhaps for this reason that she was
drawn so closely to her boy, and understood that his love of
nature, and especially of all living things, was an intellectual
tendency, and not simply a child's disposition to find friends and
playmates in the animals about him. In later years her sympathy
gave her the key to the work of his manhood, as it had done to the
sports of his childhood. She remained his most intimate friend to
the last hour of her life, and he survived her but six years.

Louis's love of natural history showed itself almost from infancy.
When a very little fellow he had, beside his collection of fishes,
all sorts of pets: birds, field-mice, hares, rabbits, guinea-pigs,
etc., whose families he reared with the greatest care. Guided by
his knowledge of the haunts and habits of fishes, he and his
brother Auguste became the most adroit of young fishermen,--using
processes all their own and quite independent of hook, line, or
net. Their hunting grounds were the holes and crevices beneath the
stones or in the water-washed walls of the lake shore. No such
shelter was safe from their curious fingers, and they acquired such
dexterity that when bathing they could seize the fish even in the
open water, attracting them by little arts to which the fish
submitted as to a kind of fascination. Such amusements are no doubt
the delight of many a lad living in the country, nor would they be
worth recording except as illustrating the unity of Agassiz's
intellectual development from beginning to end. His pet animals
suggested questions, to answer which was the task of his life; and