the power to prevent the use of adequate quotations from him. I have
followed him where I had no other guide, and no ground for suspecting
him of bias. The composition, and to some extent the interpretation of
the facts, are my own.]

In later years the robust constitution and herculean frame of Agassiz
showed the effects of his extraordinary and multifarious labors, for it
must be confessed that he was not careful of his bodily welfare. In the
year 1869 he suffered a temporary breakdown of a very threatening sort,
and for months was in seclusion, forbidden by his medical advisers even
to think. His own wise efforts, and a quiet spring passed in the
village of Deerfield, Connecticut, brought about his recovery, so that
three years of activity were yet to be vouchsafed him. But the strain
of his lectures, of his correspondence, of his labors at and for the
Museum, was perilous. On the second of December, 1873, he gave a
lecture, his last, on 'The Structural Growth of Domestic Animals,'
before the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture at Fitchburg. On the
third he dined with friends; on the fifth he was present at a family
gathering--and smoked cigars, defying the orders of his physician. But
the end was not far off. He spoke of a dimness of sight; he complained
of feeling 'strangely asleep.' On the morning of the sixth he went as
usual to the Museum, but with a sense of great weariness he shortly
returned to his room, where he lay down, never to depart from it alive.
The disease was a paralysis of the organs of respiration, beginning
with the larynx. He had every care from his friends Dr. Brown-Sequard,
who immediately came from New York, and Dr. Morrill Wyman; and the last
few days of his life were passed, not in great suffering, with his
loving family around him. Nothing, however, could arrest the progress
of the malady.