F.C.M.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

“Louis Agassiz:  His Life and Correspondence[A].”  Edited by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz.  Boston:  Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The northeastern corner of the ancient Pays de Vaud, only part of which is included in the modern canton, is little known to tourists.  It lies away from the chief lines of travel, and it has neither the magnificent views that draw the visitor aside to Orbe nor the associations that induce him to stop at Coppet or Clarens.  Yet its breezy upland plains and its quiet villages—­some of them once populous and prosperous towns—­are not devoid of charm, or of the interest connected with historical epochs and famous names.  The “lone wall” and “lonelier column” at Avenches date from the period when this was the Roman capital of Helvetia.  Morat still shows many a mark and relic of its siege by Charles the Bold and of the overthrow of his forces by the Swiss.  Payerne was the birthplace, in 1779, of Jomini, the greatest of all writers on military operations, whose precocious genius, while he was a mere stripling and before he had witnessed any battles or manoeuvres, penetrated the secret of Bonaparte’s combinations and victorious campaigns, which veteran commanders were watching with mere wonderment and dismay.  At Motiers, a few miles farther north, was born, in 1807, Louis Agassiz, who at an equally early age displayed a like intuitive comprehension of many of the workings of Nature, and who subsequently became the chief exponent of the glacial theory and the highest authority on the structure and classification of fishes.  Each of these two men gave his ripest powers and longest labors to a great country far from their common home,—­Jomini to Russia, Agassiz to the United States; and, dissimilar as were their objects and pursuits, their intellectual resemblance was fundamental.  The pre-eminent quality of each was the power of rapid generalization, of mastering and subordinating details, of grasping and applying principles and laws.  Agassiz differed as much from an animal-loving collector like Frank Buckland, whose father was one of his stanchest friends and co-workers, as Jomini differed from a fighting general like Ney, to whom he suggested the movements that resulted in the French victory at Bautzen.  Switzerland is equally proud of the great strategist and the great naturalist, but to Americans in general the former is at the most a mere name, while the career of the latter is an object of wide-spread and even national interest.

In the volumes before us the story of that career is clearly and completely, yet concisely, set forth.  Readers of biography who delight mainly in social gossip may complain of the absence of everything of the kind; but such matter neither belonged to the subject nor was required for its elucidation.  We are prone to draw a distinction between what we call a man’s personal life and the larger and