in a nice, clean leetle feesh.”  Agassiz took no pleasure in shocking his class; on the contrary he was most anxious to engage and hold them.  So too, if his audience was made up from people of the simplest.  In fact, for each he exerted his powers as generously as when addressing a company of savants.  He always kindled as he spoke, and with a marvellous magnetism communicated his glow to those who listened.  I have seen him stand before his class holding in his hand the claw of a crustacean.  In his earnestness it seemed to be for him the centre of the creation, and he made us all share his belief.  Indeed, he convinced us.  Running back from it in an almost infinite series was the many-ordered life adhering at last and scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic matter to which it clung.  Forward from it again ran the series not less long and complicated which fulfilled itself at last in the brain and soul of man.  What he held in his hand was a central link.  His colour came and went, his eye danced and his tones grew deep and tremulous, as he dwelt on the illimitable chain of being.  With a few strokes on the blackboard, he presented graphically the most intricate variations.  He felt the sublimity of what he was contemplating, and we glowed with him from the contagion of his fervour.  I have never heard his equal as an expounder of the deep things of nature.  He gloried in the exercise of his power, though hampered by poverty.  “I have no time to make money,” he cried.  He sought no title but that of teacher.  To do anything else was only to misuse his gift.  In his desk he was an inspirer, but hardly more so than in private talk.  I recall walks we took with him to study natural objects and especially the striated rocks, which, as he had detected, bore plain evidence that the configuration of the region had been shaped by glaciers.  He was charmingly affable, encouraging our questions, and unwearied in his demonstration.  “Professor,” I said once, “you teach us that in creation things rise from high to higher in the vast series until at last we come to man.  Why stop with man? why not conclude that as man surpasses what went before, so he in turn will be surpassed and supplanted by a being still superior;—­and so on and on?” I well recall the solemnity of his face as he replied that I was touching upon the deepest things, not to be dealt with in an afternoon ramble.  He would only say then that there could be nothing higher than a man with his spirit.

Whether Agassiz was as broad-minded as he was high-minded may be argued.  The story ran that when the foundations of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy were going on in Divinity Avenue, a theological professor encountering the scientist among the shadows the latter was invading, courteously bade him welcome.  He hoped the old Divinity Hall would be a good neighbour to the pile rising opposite.  “Yes,” was the bluff reply, “and I hope to see the time when it will be turned into a dormitory for my scientific students.”