Show STUDENT LIFE from applicants from all over the land with some dozen or more eminent scientists as instructors met with him on the Little island of Pen-ikein his first and only summer school Here for a few short weeks The he was supremely happy dream of his life seemed near to fulfillment and from fifty centers would the influence now radiate True it was and to those who were permitted to he with him that sumse mer the recollections of that inspiring personality are a sacred memory This school was appropriately his greatest and his last work An exhausted physical nature demanded rest hut his was a mind that knew no rest so December saw his life work cease Deeply religious by birth a spec-icreationist by association with Cuvier he formulated a conception of nature that made it sacred to him and almost a part of his religion itself To him nature was hut the expression of the thought of the Creator classification but the unfolding of the Divine plan as expressed in living realities Species were the material embodiment of divine ideas the unity of plan in the animal kingdom but association of these ideas the appearance of lower and higher forms in geological succession was but the development of a creative plan which culminated in man The fact that a species in its embryological development recapitulates the history of its race a fact which he himself discovered was to him but another proof of the cumulative character of ni 14 9 the Divine plan With such a concept of nature it is little wonder that he rejected the Darwinian theory y his critics this is regarded as a sign of weakness which would rank him below the other master minds in science If his had been a calm cold philosophic mind this would perhaps have been true l’ut to the impulsive reverential mind of Agassiz full of his own religiously endowed concepts of nature this theory was instantly repulsive as attacking his faith It was the Huguenot generations behind him that spoke in disapproval ( ireat men are to be measured by their deeds not by their shortcomings Agassiz is not alone in this respect Bacon rejected the Coper-nica- n system of astronomy Leibnitz scoffed at Newton’s law of gravitation Cuvier clung to preformation in the face of Von Baer’s demonstration of epigenesis Virchow went to his grave denying evolution even when the common 'people had generally accepted it Harvey refused to believe in the 1 existence of the lacteals Laplace ridiculed and reviled the supporters of the undulatory theory of light and with such men Agassiz In may well stand uncondemned fact no higher compliment can be paid to the method of this master than to say that in spite of his personal influence every pupil without an exception true to his instruction “looked and saw” for himself and believed in the new doctrine Ilad Agassiz confined himself to |