siz to inaction, on account of his
failing health he had broken down in his friend's study, and wept like an
'Europaer', and lamented, "I shall never finish my work!" Some papers
which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the
Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not
accept, remained part of the work which he never finished. After his
death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic,
but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he
voluntarily spoke of Agassiz's methods, which he agreed with rather than
his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian. I think he said
Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single
example, but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a question
of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins
examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.

Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to
bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced
even a conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs.
Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story
which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and
demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a
certain group of fossil fishes?" "Yes, yes!" "Well, I have just been
reading------'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least
truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in
relinquishing his error.

I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side,
of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many. I recall a dinner
at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California,
and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual
scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological "Society upon
the Stanislow." He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly
pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself
thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that
delicious poem.

Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other
end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their
difference of temperament. The one was all philosophical and the other