of those organic forms which we call forms of literature and works of
art. Yet the notion that a poem or a speech should possess the organic
structure, as it were, of a living creature is basic in the thought of
the great literary critics of all time. So Aristotle, a zoologist as
well as a systematic student of literature, compares the essential
structure of a tragedy to the form of an animal. And so Plato, in the
_Phaedrus_, makes Socrates say: 'At any rate, you will allow that
every discourse ought to be a living creature, having a body of its
own, and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning, and end,
adapted to one another and to the whole.' It would seem that to Plato
an oration represents an organic idea in the mind of the human creator,
the orator, just as a living animal represents a constructive idea in
the mind of God. Now it happens that Agassiz, considered in his
philosophical relations, was a Platonist, since he clearly believed
that the forms of nature expressed the eternal ideas of a divine
intelligence.

Accordingly, his method of teaching cannot fail to be illuminating to
the teacher of literature--or to the teacher of language, either,
since each language as a whole, and also the component parts of
language, words, for instance, are living and growing forms, and must
be studied as organisms. We have perhaps heard too much of 'laboratory'
methods in the teaching of English and the like; but none of us has
heard too much about the fundamental operations of observation and
comparison in the study of living forms, or of the way in which great
teachers have developed the original powers of the student. It is
simply the fact that, reduced to the simplest terms, there is but a
single method of investigating the objects of natural science and the
productions of human genius. We study a poem, the work of man's art, in
the same way that Agassiz made Shaler study a fish, the work of God's