Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/549

Rh he came to our country, and by his enthusiasm, his eloquence, his winning and democratic ways, he won the hearts of all, and from his advent here may be dated the wide-spread love of natural science among the masses.

Agassiz's contributions as a naturalist covered the entire range of the animal kingdom. A study of his bibliography exhibits communications, papers and memoirs on every Cuvierian class. A further study of this bibliography indicates that, as a young man, he grappled vrith. some of the most difficult groups of the animal kingdom. The fishes had been one of the most distracting divisions of the higher animals. The limitations of their genera, the homologies of their bony structure, had daunted most zoologists who confined their work to the description of species. Agassiz's first important work was the "Fishes of Brazil," based upon material brought home by Martins and Spix. This was done at the age of twenty-two. The work was written in Latin, dedicated to Cuvier, and illustrated with a folio of ninety plates. At the age of twenty-three he issued his prospectus of the natural history of the fresh-water fishes of central Europe, which was completed twelve years after, accompanied by a folio atlas of forty-one colored plates.

Difficult as was this task, he wrestled with a still more difficult one, namely, the "Fossil Fishes," and in nine years had completed this remarkable work in five quarto volumes with 400 colored folio plates. This publication alone placed him in the front rank of naturalists. An eminent geologist has written in regard to this work that Agassiz's power of classifying fossils and his success in reducing to order thousands of specimens of fishes, a great many of which were perfect puzzles to every one, was simply marvelous. The echinoderms, with their complicated covering of curious plates, spines and minute appendages, formed another most difficult group for study. From the number of fossil species in the rocks in his neighborhood Agassiz was led to a minute examination of both living and fossil forms which culminated in his great monograph of echinoderms with many plates.

The prodigious extent and character of the work done before he was thirty years old may be appreciated when it is stated that on a meager salary of $400 a year he established a lithographic press at Neuchatel, he employed two skilful artists, published a number of parts of his monograph of the echinoderms, several parts of his fossil fishes, made a profound study of the glacial phenomena of the Alps as well as of the geology and paleontology of the Jura and superadded to all this work the monographing of two molluscan genera, Mya and Trigonia. Ernest Favre, in his biographical notice of Agassiz, says, in regard to this period of his life, that he displayed an incredible energy, of which the history of science offers, perhaps, no other example.