Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/512

496 into the work, were alike unparalleled; while the course he pursued has turned out as wise for his own fame as it has proved favorable to the interests of advancing knowledge.

It is well known that Prof. Agassiz was a man of strong personality. He had great enthusiasm and impulsiveness, and the whole fervor and intensity of his nature was spent in the single-minded pursuit of science. Not content with what he could himself know, and do, and enjoy, he was powerfully impelled to make others the sharers of his knowledge, his activity, and his pleasures. He not only won them to him by his geniality, and his cordial and unaffected manners, but he inspired them with his own purposes, and moved them to his own ends. Sympathetic with all who were interested in science, he especially fascinated young men, and the ranks of our naturalists are full of those who were recruited to the work by his agency, among whom may be mentioned Verrill, Stimson, Clark, Hyatt, Putnam, Packard, Scudder, Hartt, Tenney, Morse, Niles, and Bickmore. One of his students writes of him as follows:

But Prof. Agassiz's influence was far from being confined to a small class of congenial students; it was very powerful upon the general public. A republican by nativity, and a republican by adoption, he was also a republican in sympathy and in principle, by association and habit. Although coming to this country as a great man from Europe, he had no factitious dignity to sustain, and no scruples to overcome, in plunging at once into the work of popular teaching. Entering early and fully into the spirit of our institutions, he went among the people at large, gave courses of lectures upon zoology in all the chief towns of the country, and was indefatigable in the diffusion of knowledge, and in awakening a higher appreciation of science among the people. In this he was wise and sagacious to the specific ends he had in view, for he well understood that in this country the prosperity of science is ultimately bound up with its public appreciation. In this field of effort too he was preeminently successful. As Mr. Beecher remarks, in the Christian Union:

But no estimate of Prof. Agassiz's real work among the American people will be just that stops here. True, he gave his best powers to the instruction of teachers, farmers, mechanics, and artisans, but it was not merely as a