Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/101

AGASSIZ His first important work, undertaken at the request of Martins, was a description of Brazilian fishes collected by Spix, and a little later he began his great independent work on fossil fishes.

In 1832, when twenty-five, after a period of study under the influence of Cuvier in Paris, Agassiz entered upon a professorship of natural history at Neuchatel. He retained this professorship until his removal to America. While occupying this position, he extended his studies on fossil fishes, did valuable work on echinoderms, and made important contributions on the action of glaciers. To him is due primarily the knowledge of a general glacial epoch.

Agassiz had a wonderful power of attracting people and making them devoted to his interests. In his student days he not only got other students to join in with him in forming clubs for scientific study, but induced artists to work for him for almost nothing. He went about things as if he were very rich instead of poor and then managed to get relatives and friends to help him out of his financial troubles. At Neuchatel, where his salary at first was but $400, he had a large staff of scientific assistants and artists and got into very serious financial difficulties. His reckless daring in expenditures, however, enabled him to do a prodigious amount of scientific work, which otherwise would have been impossible. At the age of thirty he had achieved a world-wide reputation as a naturalist and had done the most important work on which his reputation as a scientist rests. After this period his scientific contributions, though considerable in amount and valuable, were hampered on the one hand by a too complex, unorganized, and not always harmonious staff of assistants, and on the other hand by the need to raise money to pay debts in which his undertakings involved him.

In 1846 his financial difficulties had reached such an acute stage that his home was broken up, while his wife, the sister of Alexander Braun, the botanist, a student and life-long friend of Agassiz, went with her three children to live with her brother. Agassiz departed for America on a grant obtained in his behalf from the King of Prussia by Alexander von Humboldt. On Agassiz's first visit to Paris in 1831-2 he had met and much attracted von Humboldt, who was then at the zenith of his power. After this period, von Humboldt showed his friendship for Agassiz in many ways, not the least of which was the obtaining of this grant.

Agassiz came to America at the age of thirty-nine. His primary object was to study the natural history of the country. He prepared himself, however, to make his visit as profitable as possible and diligently studied English on his long ocean trip. After arriving in America, he visited some of the chief cities of the country and met most of those who at that time were prominent students of natural history in America. He was especially attracted by the work of Dana of Yale and Samuel G. Morton of Philadelphia.

Before Agassiz came to America, his friend Charles Lyell had arranged that he might give a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston, thus giving him opportunity to supplement his income and at the same time to gain a public introduction. He was enthusiastically greeted. His wife states that:

"His skill in drawing with chalk on the blackboard was also a great help both to him and to them. When his English was at fault he could nevertheless explain his meaning by illustrations so graphic that the spoken word was hardly missed. He said of himself that he was no artist, and that his drawing curate simply because the object e\i ted in his mind so clearly. However this may be, it was always pleasant to watch the effect of his drawings on the and When showing, for instance, the correspondence of the articulate type, as a whole, with the metamorphosis of the higher insects, he would lead his along the successive phases of insect development, talking as he drew and