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.

The statement that different sets of animals and plants