atural selection as one of the epidemics
which have swept the scientific world from time to time, and looked
with absolute serenity to the return of science one day to the
conception of creation by design.

I am neither qualified nor disposed to pass judgment on Agassiz as
a scientist, or institute any kind of comparison of his relative
authority, and probably the time is far away at which his comparative
eminence can be estimated impartially. I have only to do with his
personality as it appeared to me in our relations, and, as the latest
survivor of those who enjoyed that greenwood intimacy, to put on
record my impression of the great, lovable, magnanimous man. Of his
unbounded generosity and indifference to personal advantage, his
freedom from scientific jealousy, everybody who came in contact with
him was witness. He refused all offers of emolument from any quarter,
and spent all his surplus earnings for the aggrandizement of the great
natural-history museum he founded at Cambridge. The propositions of
the Emperor Napoleon III. he had declined with thanks as soon as
made, and without a thought. He had come to America to study natural
history, and did not propose to be diverted from this purpose. To a
lecturing agent who offered him a very large sum for delivering a
course of lectures in the principal cities of the Union, he replied
that he had no time to make money; and he died of overwork, insatiate
in the pursuit of the completion of his museum and the classification
of his observations. I have heard him speak with pain of the animosity
shown him by a Swiss associate in his glacial investigations, who
had once been his warm advocate, but there was no bitterness in his
manner. I am convinced that there was no bitterness in him, and that
all personal feeling was overshadowed and minimized by his absolute
devotion to scientific truth, with his loyalty to which nothing ever
interfered.

His influence even on the business men of the city of Boston and the
legislature of the State of Massachusetts was the most remarkable
phenomenon of the kind ever witnessed in that frugal and
matter-of-fact community, for he had only to announce that he wanted
for his museum or department in the University a donation or an
appropriation, to obtain either, so absolutely recognized was his
unselfish devotion to science by all classes. There are few of us left
who can remember the sudden shadow that fell on our community at his
unexpect