“Teaching was a passion with him, and his power over his pupils might be measured by his own enthusiasm.  He was, intellectually as well as socially, a democrat in the best sense.  He delighted to scatter broadcast the highest results of thought and research, and to adapt them even to the youngest and most uninformed minds.  In his later American travels he would talk of glacial phenomena to the driver of a country stage-coach among the mountains, or to some workman splitting rock at the roadside, with as much earnestness as if he had been discussing problems with a brother geologist; he would take the common fisherman into his scientific confidence, telling him the intimate secrets of fish-culture or fish-embryology, till the man in his turn grew enthusiastic and began to pour out information from the stores of his own rough and untaught habits of observation.  Agassiz’s general faith in the susceptibility of the popular intelligence, however untaught, to the highest truths of nature, was contagious, and he created or developed that in which he believed.”

The following citations exhibit his powers of observation, and that happy method of stating scientific facts which interests the specialist and general reader alike.

THE SILURIAN BEACH

From ‘Geological Sketches’

With what interest do we look upon any relic of early human history!  The monument that tells of a civilization whose hieroglyphic records we cannot even decipher, the slightest trace of a nation that vanished and left no sign of its life except the rough tools and utensils buried in the old site of its towns or villages, arouses our imagination and excites our curiosity.  Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep wonder.

To me it seems, that to look on the first land that was ever lifted above the wasted waters, to follow the shore where the earliest animals and plants were created when the thought of God first expressed itself in organic forms, to hold in one’s hand a bit of stone from an old sea-beach, hardened into rock thousands of centuries ago, and studded with the beings that once crept upon its surface or were stranded there by some retreating wave, is even of deeper interest to men than the relics of their own race, for these things tell more directly of the thoughts and creative acts of God.