ve in the first
volume will give the general reader a vivid but insufficient conception
of the stupendous work upon which he so brilliantly labored for nearly a
decade of years.

_Coelum, non animum, mutant_ who come with such a spirit to a wider and,
scientifically, less developed continent. First as visitor, soon as
denizen, and at length as citizen of the American republic, Agassiz rose
with every occasion to larger and more various activities. What with the
Lowell Institute, the college in Charleston, S. C., and Cornell
University, in addition to Harvard, he may be said to have held three or
four professorships at once, none of them sinecures. He had not been two
months in the country before a staff of assistants was gathered around
him, and a marine zooelogical laboratory was in operation. The rude shed
on the shore, and the small wooden building at Cambridge, developed
under his hand into the Museum of Zooelogy--if not as we see it now, yet
into one of the foremost collections. Who can say what it would have
been if his plans and ideas had obtained full recognition, and
"expenditure" had seemed to the trustees, as it seemed to him, "the best
investment;" or if efficient filial aid, not then to be dreamed of, had
not given solid realization to the high paternal aspirations? In like
manner grew large under his hand the Brazilian exploration, so
generously provided for by a Boston citizen and fostered by an
enlightened emperor; and on a similar scale was planned, and partly
carried out, the "Contributions to the Natural History of the United
States," as the imperial quarto work was modestly entitled, which was
to be published "at the rate of one volume a year, each volume to
contain about three hundred pages and twenty plates," with simple
reliance upon a popular subscription; and so, indeed, of everything
which this large-minded man undertook.

While Agassiz thus was a magnanimous man, in the literal as well as the
accepted meaning of the word, he was also, as we have seen, a truly
fortunate one. Honorable assistance came to him at critical moments,
such as the delicate gift from Humboldt at Paris, which perhaps saved
him to science; such as the Wollaston prize from the Geological Society
in 1834, when he was struggling for the means of carrying on the "Fossil
Fishes." The remainder of the deficit of this undertaking he was able to
make up from his earliest earnings in America. For the rest, we all know
how almost