VI

HOW AGASSIZ TAUGHT PROFESSOR WILDER

[Footnote: From an article by Professor Burt G. Wilder, of Cornell
University, in _The Harvard Graduates' Magazine_, June, 1907. The
extract is taken from a reprint with slight changes by the author, and
is given with slight omissions by the present writer.]


The phrase adopted as the title of this article ['Louis Agassiz,
Teacher'] begins his simple will, Agassiz was likewise an investigator,
a director of research, and the founder of a great museum. He really
was four men in one. Without detracting from the extent and value of
the three other elements of his intense and composite American life--
from his first course of lectures before the Lowell Institute in 1846
to the inauguration of the Anderson Summer School of Natural History at
Penikese Island, July 8, 1873, and his address before the Massachusetts
State Board of Agriculture, twelve days before his untimely death on
December 14, 1873,--Agassiz was pre-eminently a teacher. He taught his
assistants; he taught the teachers in the public schools; he taught
college students; he taught the public, and the common people heard him
gladly. His unparalleled achievements as an instructor are thus
chronicled by his wife:

'A teacher in the widest sense, he sought and found his pupils in
every class. But in America for the first time did he come into contact
with the general mass of the people on this common ground, and it
influenced strongly his final resolve to remain in this country. Indeed
the secret of his greatest power was to be found in the sympathetic,