Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/750

728 He often talked to us of the Darwinian theory, to which in all its forms he was most earnestly opposed. Agassiz was essentially an idealist. All his investigations were to him not studies of animals or plants as such, but of the divine plans of which their structures are the expression. "That earthly form was the cover of spirit was to him a truth at once fundamental and self-evident." The work of the student was to search out the thoughts of God, and as well as may be to think them over again. To Agassiz these divine thoughts were especially embodied in the relations of animals to each other. The species was the thought-unit, the individual reproduction of the thought in the divine mind at the moment of the creation of the first one of the series which represents the species. The marvel of the affinity of structure—of unity of plan in creatures widely diverse in habits and outward appearance—was to him a result of the association of ideas in the divine mind, an illustration of divine many-sidedness. To Darwin these same relations would illustrate the force of heredity acting under diverse conditions of environment.

Agassiz had no sympathy with the prejudices worked upon by weak and foolish men in opposition to Darwinism. He believed in the absolute freedom of science; that no power on earth can give answers beforehand to the questions which men of science endeavor to solve. Of this I can give no better evidence than the fact that every one of the men specially trained by him has joined the ranks of the evolutionists. He would teach them to think for themselves, not to think as he did.

The strain of the summer was heavier than we knew. Before the school came to an end, those who were nearest him felt that the effort was to be his last. His physician told him that he must not work, must not think. But all his life he had done nothing else. To stop was impossible, for with his temperament there was the sole choice between activity and death.

And in December the end came. In the words of one of his old students, Theodore Lyman, "We buried him from the chapel that stands among the college elms. The students laid a wreath of laurel on his bier, and their manly voices sang a requiem. For he had been a student all his life long, and when he died he was younger than any of them."

The next summer, the students of the first year came together at Penikese, and many eager new faces were with them. Wise and skillful teachers were present, but Agassiz was not there, and the sense of loss was felt above everything else. The life was gone out from Penikese, and at the end of the summer the authorities of the museum closed the doors of the Anderson School forever. The buildings stand on the island, just as we left them in 1874, a single old sea-captain in charge of them all these years, until last