Overland
Journey to San Francisco," "The American Conflict," and "Recollections
of a Busy Life." He was also the founder of "The Whig Almanac," a manual
of politics, which in later years became known as "The Tribune Almanac,"
and survived his demise.

[Signature of the author.]

LOUIS AGASSIZ[15]

By ASA GRAY

(1807-1873)

[Footnote 15: Written in 1886, on the publication of "Louis
Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence." Reprinted, by permission
of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., from "The Scientific Papers
of Asa Gray."]

[Illustration: Louis Agassiz. [TN]]

There is no need to give an abstract of the contents of these
fascinating volumes, for everybody is reading them. Most are probably
wishing for more personal details, especially of the American life; but
the editorial work is so deftly and delicately done, and "the story of
an intellectual life marked by rare coherence and unity" is so well
arranged to tell itself and make its impression, that we may thankfully
accept what has been given us, though the desired "fulness of personal
narrative" be wanting.

Twelve years have passed since Agassiz was taken from us. Yet to some of
us it seems not very long ago that the already celebrated Swiss
naturalist came over, in the bloom of his manly beauty, to charm us with
his winning ways, and inspire us with his overflowing enthusiasm, as he
entered upon the American half of that career which has been so
beneficial to the interests of natural science. There are not many left
of those who attended those first Lowell Lectures in the autumn of
1846--perhaps all the more taking for the broken English in which they
were delivered--and who shared in the delight with which, in a
supplementary lecture, he more fluently addressed his audience in his
mother-tongue.

In these earliest lectures he sounded the note of which his last public
utterance was the dying cadence. For, as this biography rightly
intimates, his scientific life was singularly entire and homogeneous--if
not uninfluenced, yet quite unchanged, by the transitions which have
marked the period. In a small circle of naturalists, almost the first
that was assembled to greet him on his coming to this country, and of
which the writer is the sole survivor, when Agassiz was inquired of as
to his conception of "species," he sententiously replied: "A species is
a thought of the Creator." To this thoroughly theistic conceptio