the
floods of its opprobrium, and even the little dogs of physical science
bark at his name; but his greater contemporaries knew and esteemed him
better. The revival of the evolutionary hypothesis by Darwin, and the
controversies growing out of it, then filled the air, and Agassiz paid
the penalty of his eminence and constancy to the system in which he
had been grounded by his master, Cuvier. He was attacked and insulted
by men who had never made an observation, and, what was more curious,
as a panderer to the theological prejudices of the past. But in
my mind was still the memory of a former outcry and theological
persecution of him, because he had himself laid down what might
be considered the forerunner of the doctrine of evolution,--the
declaration that the human race could not have been the offspring of
one Adam, but must have had a multiple beginning. The result of this
was to bring on his head the execrations of the theological world in a
storm which no one who had witnessed it was likely to forget or take
for other than what it was, the proof of his absolute scientific
honesty,--a proof needed by no one who knew him personally, but which,
in view of the later animosity shown him, requires reaffirmation.

As I was much with him at this time, and perhaps, out of his family,
the one to whom he talked with the greatest freedom and fullness on
the subject, owing to my own intense interest in it, it cannot be
amiss that I state his exact position as far as he let me see it. It
must be remembered that the doctrine of evolution, as he knew it, and
in the only form in which it was then stated, was simply and purely
that of development by natural selection acting on chance variation,
and differing mainly by this from the doctrine of Lamarck, which had
long been rejected by the scientific world at large. We have seen
since then that this primitive doctrine has been largely supplemented
by other theories, and that it no longer stands before the scientific
world in the bare simplicity of Darwin's original statement, though
even he, at a later date, claimed natural selection not as the
only but as the most influential agency of variation of species in
creation; repudiating, however, a plan in the universe, and not
demanding the influence of the conscious mind on creation. Agassiz's
primary objection to the doctrine was that it left the creator out of
creation, for it distinctly repudiated the element of design in it;
and, t