Correspondence_, pp. 206 ff. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885.]


[In the autumn of the year 1832] Agassiz assumed the duties of his
professorship at Neuchatel. His opening lecture, upon the relations
between the different branches of natural history and the then
prevailing tendencies of all the sciences, was given on the 12th of
November ... at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon
the listeners as recorded at the time, this introductory discourse must
have been characterized by the same broad spirit of generalization
which marked Agassiz's later teaching. Facts in his hands fell into
their orderly relation as parts of a connected whole, and were never
presented merely as special or isolated phenomena. From the beginning
his success as an instructor was undoubted. He had, indeed, now entered
upon the occupation which was to be from youth to old age the delight
of his life. Teaching was a passion with him, and his power over his
pupils might be measured by his own enthusiasm. He was intellectually,
as well as socially, a democrat, in the best sense. He delighted to
scatter broadcast the highest results of thought and research, and to
adapt them even to the youngest and most uninformed minds. In his later
American travels he would talk of glacial phenomena to the driver of a
country stagecoach among the mountains, or to some workman, splitting
rock at the road-side, with as much earnestness as if he had been
discussing problems with a brother geologist; he would take the common
fisherman into his scientific confidence, telling him the intimate
secrets of fish-structure or fish-embryology, till the man in his turn
became enthusiastic, and began to pour out information from the stores
of his own rough and untaught habits of observation. Agassiz's general
faith in the susceptibility of the popular intelligence, however
untrained, to the highest truths of nature, was contagious, and he