ngs and notes prepared for his
own use. Humboldt, at a critical moment, saved him from the necessity
for abandoning his projects by an unsolicited loan, supplemented by many
further acts of assistance of a different kind. In England every
possible facility and aid was afforded to him as well by private
individuals as by public institutions. In America, men like Mr.
Nathaniel Thayer and Mr. John Anderson needed only in some chance way to
become acquainted with his plans to be ready to provide the means for
carrying them out. It was the same on all occasions. The United States
government, the Coast Survey, the legislature of Massachusetts, private
individuals throughout the country, showed a rare willingness, and even
eagerness, to forward his views. The man and the object were identified
in people's minds, and, as in all such cases, a feeling was roused and
an impulse generated which could have sprung from no other source.

The attractiveness and charm which everybody seems to have found in him
had perhaps the same origin. It does not appear that his nature was
peculiarly sympathetic, that it was through any unusual flow and warmth
of feeling toward others that he so quickly became the object of their
attachment or regard. Of course, we do not intend to intimate that he
was deficient in strength of affection or in the least degree cold or
unresponsive. But his "magnetism," to use the current word, lay in the
ardor and singleness of his devotion to science, not as an abstraction,
but as a potent agency in civilization, in the union of elevation with
enthusiasm, in an openness that seemed to reveal everything, yet nothing
that should have been hidden. Hence this biography, little as it deals
with purely personal matters, awakens an interest of precisely the same
kind as that which the living Agassiz was accustomed to excite. For the
student of comparative zoology or of glacial action all that is here
told about these subjects can have only an historical value. But no
reader can follow the successive steps of a career that was always in
the truest sense upward without being touched by that inspiring
influence which it constantly diffused, and which Americans, above all
others, have reason to hold in grateful remembrance.

Illustrated Books.

"The Sermon on the Mount." Boston: Roberts Brothers.

"Poems of Nature." By John Greenleaf Whittier. Illustrated from Nature
by Elbridge Kingsley. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mi