Humboldt and Von Buch,
with all their interest in Agassiz, were quite unable to comprehend the
importance of an inquiry which was directly in their line, and, indeed,
they scorned it; while the young naturalist, without training in physics
or geology, but with the insight of genius, at once developed the whole
idea of the glacial period, with its wonderful consequences, upon his
first inspection of the phenomena shown him by Charpentier in the valley
of the Rhone.

It is well that Humboldt's advice was not heeded in this regard.
Nevertheless he was a wise counsellor. He saw the danger into which his
young friend's enthusiasm and boundless appetite for work was likely to
lead him. For Agassiz it might be said, with a variation of the
well-known adage, that there was nothing he touched that he did not
aggrandize. Everything he laid hold of grew larger under his hand--grew
into a mountain threatening to overwhelm him, and would have overwhelmed
anyone whose powers were not proportionate to his aspirations.
Established at Neuchatel, and giving himself with ardor to the duties of
his professorship, it was surely enough if he could do the author's
share in the production of his great works on the fossil and the
fresh-water fishes, without assuming the responsibilities and cares of
publication as well, and even of a lithographic establishment which he
set up mainly for his own use. But he carried _pari passu_, or nearly
so, his work on fossil mollusca--a quarto volume with nearly a hundred
plates--his monographs of echinoderms, living and fossil, his
investigations of the embryological development of fishes, and that
laborious work, the "Nomenclator Zoologicus," with the "Bibliographia,"
later published in England by the Ray Society. Moreover, of scattered
papers, those of the Royal Society's Catalogue, which antedate his
arrival in this country, are more than threescore and ten. He had help,
indeed; but the more he had, the more he enlarged and diversified his
tasks; Humboldt's sound advice about his zooelogical undertakings being
no more heeded than his fulminations against the glacial theory.

In the midst of all this, Agassiz turned his glance upon the glaciers,
and the "local phenomenon" became at once a cosmic one. So far a happy
divination; but he seems to have believed quite to the last that, not
only the temperate zones, but whole intertropical continents--at least
the American--had been sheeted with ice. The narrati