The beauty of his better self lives on   In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye   He trained to Truth's exact severity;   He was a Teacher: why be grieved for him   Whose living word still stimulates the air?   In endless file shall loving scholars come   The glow of his transmitted touch to share. —Lowell, Agassiz....

If it be asked why a teacher of English should be moved to issue this book on Agassiz, my reply might be: 'Read the Introductory Note'-for the answer is there. But doubtless the primary reason is that I have been taught, and I try to teach others, after a method in essence identical with that employed by the great naturalist. And I might go on to show in some detail that a doctoral investigation in the humanities, when the subject is well chosen, serves the same purpose in the education of a stu

When the question was put to Agassiz, 'What do you regard as your greatest work?' he replied: 'I have taught men to observe.' And in the preamble to his will he described himself in three words as 'Louis Agassiz, Teacher.' We have more than one reason to be interested in the form of instruction employed by so eminent a scientist as Agassiz. In the first place, it is much to be desired that those who concern themselves with pedagogy should give relatively less heed to the way in which subjects, a

[Footnote: From E. C. Agassiz, Louis Agassiz, his Life and Correspondence , pp. 206 ff. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885.] [In the autumn of the year 1832] Agassiz assumed the duties of his professorship at Neuchatel. His opening lecture, upon the relations between the different branches of natural history and the then prevailing tendencies of all the sciences, was given on the 12th of November … at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon the listeners as recorded at the tim

[Footnote: From E. C. Agassiz, Louis Agassiz, his Life and Correspondence , pp. 564 ff. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885.] On his return to Cambridge at the end of September [1859], Agassiz found the Museum building well advanced. It was completed in the course of the next year, and the dedication took place on the 13th of November, 1860. The transfer of the collections to their new and safe abode was made as rapidly as possible, and the work of developing the institution under these more

[Footnote: From The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler , pp. 93-100. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1907.] At the time of my secession from the humanities, Agassiz was in Europe; he did not return, I think, until the autumn of 1859. I had, however, picked up several acquaintances among his pupils, learned what they were about, and gained some notion of his methods. After about a month he returned, and I had my first contact with the man who was to have the most influence on my life o

[Footnote: From a private letter from Professor Addison Emery Verrill to Lane Cooper. The extract is printed with the consent of Professor Verrill.] In regard to the methods of instruction of Agassiz I must say that so far as I saw and experienced he had no regular or fixed method, except that his plan was to make young students depend on natural objects rather than on statements in books. To that end he treated each one of his new students differently, according to the amount of knowledge and e

[Footnote: From an article by Professor Burt G. Wilder, of Cornell University, in The Harvard Graduates' Magazine , June, 1907. The extract is taken from a reprint with slight changes by the author, and is given with slight omissions by the present writer.] The phrase adopted as the title of this article ['Louis Agassiz, Teacher'] begins his simple will, Agassiz was likewise an investigator, a director of research, and the founder of a great museum. He really was four men in one. Without detract

[Footnote: 'In the Laboratory with Agassiz,' by Samuel H. Scudder, from Every Saturday (April 4, 1874) 16, 369-370.] It was more than fifteen years ago [from 1874] that I entered the laboratory of Professor Agassiz, and told him I had enrolled my name in the Scientific School as a student of natural history. He asked me a few questions about my object in coming, my antecedents generally, the mode in which I afterwards proposed to use the knowledge I might acquire, and, finally, whether I wished

[Footnote: The materials for this sketch are drawn from several sources—chiefly the Life by Marcou (which I have used with some caution) and the Life by Mrs. Agassiz. I had wished to preserve the words of Marcou throughout (with judicious omissions), but this wish was defeated by certain persons who, for reasons unknown to me, have the power to prevent the use of adequate quotations from him. I have followed him where I had no other guide, and no ground for suspecting him of bias. The compositio

[Footnote: The first nine of these utterances were taken down by Dr. David Stair Jordan at Penikese, in the summer of 1873, from Agassiz's talks to teachers; see Popular Science Monthly 40. 726-727, and Holder, Louis Agassiz, his Life and Works, 1893, pp. 173-176. The next five come from the article entitled 'Louis Agassiz, Teacher,' by Professor Burt G. Wilder, in The Harvard Graduate's Magazine, June, 1907, and the last three from Agassiz's posthumous article, "Evolution and Permanence of Type

[Footnote: August Boeckh; Encyclopadie und Methodobgie der Philologischen Wissenschaften , pp. 46-47.] The person who first seeks to acquire a general survey of a science, and then gradually to descend to details, will never attain to sound and exact knowledge, but will for ever dissipate his energies, and, knowing many things, will yet know nothing. In his lectures on the Method of Academical Study, Schelling remarks with great justice that, in history, to begin with a survey of the entire past

[The passage is thus summarized by Jowett: 'He who would be truly initiated should pass from the concrete to the abstract, from the individual to the universal, from the universal to the universe of truth and beauty. [Footnote: Plato, Symposium . _The Dialogues of Plato, translated by Jowett, New York, Oxford University Press, 1892, 1. 580-582.]] Diotima …. These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of