of his powers with his
tasks. If ever a person lived by faith, he did. When a boy of twenty,
with an allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars a year, he
maintained an artist attached to his employ, a custom which never
afterwards was departed from,--except when he maintained two or three.
He lectured from the very outset to all those who would hear him. "I
feel within myself the strength of a whole generation," he wrote to his
father at that time, and launched himself upon the publication of his
costly "Poissons Fossiles" with no clear vision of the quarter from
whence the payment might be expected to come.

At Neuchatel (where between the ages of twenty-five and thirty he
enjoyed a stipend that varied from four hundred to six hundred dollars)
he organized a regular academy of natural history, with its museum,
managing by one expedient or another to employ artists, secretaries,
and assistants, and to keep a lithographic and printing establishment
of his own employed with the work that he put forth. Fishes, fossil
and living, echinoderms and glaciers, transfigured themselves under his
hand, and at thirty he was already at the zenith of his reputation,
recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense,
one of those folio copies of mankind, like Linnaeus and Cuvier, who aim
at nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole of animated Nature.
His genius for classifying was simply marvellous; and, as his latest
biographer says, nowhere had a single person ever given so decisive an
impulse to natural history.

Such was the human being who on an October morning fifty years ago
disembarked at our port, bringing his hungry heart along with him, his
confidence in his destiny, and his imagination full of plans. The only
particular resource he was assured of was one course of Lowell
Lectures. But of one general resource he always was assured, having
always counted on it and never found it to fail,--and that was the good
will of every fellow-creature in whose presence he could find an
opportunity to describe his aims. His belief in these was so intense
and unqualified that he could not conceive of others not feeling the
furtherance of them to be a duty binding also upon them. _Velle non
discitur_, as Seneca says:--Strength of desire must be born with a man,
it can't be taught. And Agassiz came before one with such enthusiasm
glowing in his countenance,--such a persuasion radiating from his
person t