"Agassiz" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have a wider interest and usefulness; might, perhaps, serve as a stimulus and an encouragement to others. For this reason, and also because I am inclined to believe that the European portion of the life of Louis Agassiz is little known in his adopted country, while its American period must be unfamiliar to many in his native land, I have determined to publish the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... digiti pedis, Herculem, ejusque patrem, matrem, avos et proavos, filios, nepotes et pronepotes! Talk to me about your [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]! Tell me about Cuvier's getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the "O" revealed Giotto,—as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,—so all a man's antecedents and possibilities are summed up in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... far within the lines of any such system, and in some cases may extend beyond them, for reasons drawn from the habits of a particular people at a particular time. I once heard the late Professor Agassiz say that a German population would rise if you added two cents to the price of a glass of beer. A statute in such a case would be empty words, not because it was wrong, but because it could not be enforced. No one will deny that wrong ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... Professor Agassiz, one of the greatest naturalists of the last generation, went even further, and maintained not only that each species was specially created, but that it was created in the proportions and in the localities in which we now find it to ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... indulged in by W.C. Root, the Wisconsin amateur Bogardus, Jennings McDonald, Captain of a breech-loading steamboat, and the subscriber. In the first place, it may be well to state that the woodcock, or "Timber Doodle," as Prof. Agassiz calls it, is a game bird. We know it is a game bird, because they charge a dollar apiece for them in New York. The meat is about as sweet as deceased cow's liver, but they are worth a dollar apiece. The "Timber Doodle" is a patriotic bird, because he gets ripe on the 4th ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... Library Hall, where Glidden led his hearers through the intricacies of Egyptian Archaeology. Here Agassiz sometimes lectured on Zooelogy, and our youthful poet may have watched animals from the jungle climb up the blackboard at the touch of what would have been only a piece of chalk in any other hand, but became a magic creative force under the guidance ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... personality that in a moment I lost sight of her age; it was like standing soul to soul, and beyond the reach of time. Dressed in black velvet, with point lace on her hair, and repeated at throat and wrists, she made me think at once of Romola and Dorothea Brooke. She talked of Agassiz, of his museum at Cambridge, of the great natural-history collections at Naples, of Sir Edwin Landseer's pictures, and with enthusiasm of Mr. Furnival's Shakspere and Chaucer classes at the Working Men's College... She had quaint etchings of some ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... an outsider, to be the real safety-valves, the real backbone of the literary productions of the day. With them science is but a synonym of truth; they fling all superstition and ignorance to the winds, and should be better known. Such names as Edison, Cope, Marsh, Hall, Young, Field, Baird, Agassiz, and fifty more might be mentioned, all authors whose books will give them undying fame, men who have devoted a lifetime to research and the accumulation of knowledge; yet the author of the last novel, "My Mule from New Jersey," will, for ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... delight in their delights. But there was one sort of hero I never could understand, and that was the boy whose favorite reading was natural history, who kept an aquarium, collected beetles, and knew all about a man by the name of Agassiz. This style of boy always had a seafaring uncle, or a missionary aunt, who sent him all sorts of queer things from China and the South Sea Islands; and the conversation between this boy and the seafaring uncle home on a visit, I was perfectly willing to skip. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... already within the aquarium, in the company of their more bulky neighbors. These peculiar creatures, or things, form the boundary where the last gleam of animal life is so feeble and flickering as to render it doubtful whether they belong to the animal or vegetable kingdom. Agassiz calls them Protozoa,—Primary Existences. Some divide them into two great classes, namely: the Anthozoa, or Flower-Life; and the Polyzoa, or Many-Life, in which the individuals are associated in numbers. They are mostly inhabitants of the water; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... of bream found in our river, without the red spot on the operculum, which, according to M. Agassiz, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... sensible woman. She was never more so than now. Any other mother would have gone into hysterics and begged the recruiting officer to let her boy off. But she knew better. Still, I think Eddie felt some uncomfortable pangs when he looked at her set face. On the way to the depot we had to pass the Agassiz School, where Josie Morehouse was substituting second reader for the Wilson girl, who was sick. She was standing in the window as we passed. Eddie took off his cap and waved to her, and she returned the wave as well as she could without having the children see her. That would never have done, seeing ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... less follies. The events of yesterday were part of that general plan on which the world was first formed and on which it may have been conducted through all the hundreds of centuries which puzzle Agassiz and frighten the theologists. The downfall of an empire and the picking up of a basket of chips by a ragged child in a ship-yard, may each have equally formed part of it, and each been equally impossible to avert. Human will seemed to move each event, and human responsibility certainly ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... admit any truth in the higher regions of thought; and we confess, that, until we had read this little child's book, "How Plants Grow," we had always suspected Dr. Gray of leaning towards that old error, so finely exposed by Agassiz in zooelogy, of considering genera, families, etc., as divisions made by human skill, for human convenience,—instead of as divisions belonging to the Creator's plan, as yet but partially understood by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... confirmed in Lanier a natural religious fervor. But the man who was destined to have a really formative influence over him was James Woodrow, of the department of science. A native of England and during his younger days a citizen of Pennsylvania, he had studied at Lawrence Scientific School under Agassiz, and had just returned from two years' study in Germany when Lanier came under his influence. Circumstances were such that he never became an investigator in his special line of work, but he was a thorough scholar who kept abreast with the knowledge of his subject. He afterwards became ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... held her salon, drawing the best minds about her. She appreciated the privilege of having a home in Mr. John Swett's family, because of its intellectual atmosphere. Here scholarly notabilities from near and far were entertained, among them Emerson, Agassiz, and Julia Ward Howe. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... buried forests, superimposed one upon the other, was found, a few years ago, a human skeleton, estimated by Dr. B. Dowler to have been buried at least fifty thousand years—in the coral reefs of Florida, in which fossil human remains were found, estimated by Professor Agassiz to have an antiquity of ten thousand years—in the recent deposits of seas and lakes, in the central district of Scotland, which bears clear traces of an upheaval since the human period, and in the raised beaches of Norway and Sweden—passing ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... teachers were some men of admitted eminence. Agassiz was with me about two years as lecturer in Natural History. His skill in drawing upon the blackboard while he went on with his oral explanation was a constant marvel. He was not a miser in matter of knowledge more than ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... were two crest lines—the old Cretaceous line of which the Crystal Range immediately overlooking Desolation Valley on the west, with Pyramid and Agassiz Peaks as its salient points,—and the new Tertiary crest line, reaching somewhat irregularly from Honey Lake in the north to Mono Lake in the south. At the north of Lake Tahoe, "southwest of Reno, a large andesitic volcano poured forth ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Louis Agassiz once said that the biggest gulf in Organic Nature was that between the unicellular and the multicellular animals (Protozoa and Metazoa). But the gulf was bridged very long ago when sponges, stinging animals, and simple worms were evolved, and showed, for the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... never been wanting men, and strong men, to echo these appeals. From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on the excellence of woman and her preeminence over man, down to the first youthful thesis of Agassiz, "Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior," there has been a succession of voices crying in the wilderness. In England, Anthony Gibson wrote a book, in 1599, called "A Woman's Woorth, defended against all the Men in the World, proving them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... explained to me as the grooves made by the irruption of the deluge, which carried masses of stone across the broad ledges and left these scratches, then held widely as testimony to the actuality of the great deluge of Genesis. I think that we had to wait for Agassiz to show us that the "diluvial scratches" were really glacial abrasions, caused by the great glacier which came down the valley of the Hudson and went to sea off Sandy Hook. At this time my brother was making conchology his special study, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... years ago, the now almost forgotten Adirondack Club had their shanty—the successor of "the Philosophers' Camp" on Follensbee Pond. Agassiz, Appleton, Norton, Emerson, Lowell, Hoar, Gray, John Holmes, and Stillman, were among the company who made their resting-place under the shadow of Mount Seward. They had bought a tract of forest land completely encircling the pond, cut a rough road to it through the woods, and built a comfortable ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... miracle." Science, history, and art might mourn at the loss they sustained in the destruction of the house of Dr. Gibbes, an antiquary and naturalist, a scientific acquaintance, if not a friend, of Agassiz. His large library, portfolios of fine engravings, two hundred paintings, a remarkable cabinet of Southern fossils, a collection of sharks' teeth, "pronounced by Agassiz to be the finest in the world," relics of our aborigines and others ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Krummacher's Suffering Saviour. Banvard's American Histories. The Aimwell Stories. Newcomb's Works. Tweedie's Works. Chambers's Works. Harris' Works. Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature. Mrs. Knight's Life of Montgomery. Kitto's History of Palestine. Whewell's Work. Wayland's Works. Agassiz's Works. Williams' Works. Guyot's Works. Thompson's Better Land. Kimball's Heaven. Valuable Works on Missions. Haven's Mental Philosophy. Buchanan's Modern Atheism. Cruden's Condensed Concordance. Eadie's Analytical Concordance. The Psalmist: a Collection of Hymns. Valuable School ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... "profanation of the Sabbath;" namely, "That on the —— day of —— during Divine Service on the Lord's Day they did smile." The culprits were adjudged to be guilty of the offence, and severally fined "five shillings and costs." This book was shown to the late Professor Agassiz, who examined it with great interest and then made the following remark: "I find here evidence of the difference between the Calvinism of Switzerland and the Calvinism of America. I was brought up in that faith. I went to meeting in the morning, I danced with the parson's ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... and was gone. The appearance was unreal. What made it more spectral was the bell on the reefs, swinging in its triangle, always sounding, and the momentary scream of the fog-whistle. It was like an enchanted coast. Regaining the carriage, they drove out to the end, Agassiz's Point, where, when the mist lifted, they saw the sea all round dotted with sails, the irregular coasts and islands with headlands and lighthouses, all the picture still, land and water in a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... another path which leads from the Lower Saranac Lake, near "Martin's," to what the guides call, or used to call, "The Philosopher's Camp" at Amperzand. On this oddly named lake, in the Adirondack region, a tract of land was bought by Professor Agassiz and his friends, who made there a summer camping-ground, and with one comrade I once sought the spot. I remember with what joy we left the boat,—so delightful at first, so fatiguing at last; for I cannot, with Mr. Murray, call it a merit ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... de Noel Brillaient, palpitaient au ciel, Six gaillards, et chacun ivre, Chantaient gaiment dans le givre, "Bons amis, Allons done chez Agassiz!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... before he had witnessed any battles or manoeuvres, penetrated the secret of Bonaparte's combinations and victorious campaigns, which veteran commanders were watching with mere wonderment and dismay. At Motiers, a few miles farther north, was born, in 1807, Louis Agassiz, who at an equally early age displayed a like intuitive comprehension of many of the workings of Nature, and who subsequently became the chief exponent of the glacial theory and the highest authority on the structure and classification of fishes. Each of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... and knew exactly what marks they left behind in their passage, to point out the proofs of their former presence in Northern Europe and America, where it seems almost impossible to believe they existed. Such a man was Louis Agassiz, the eminent naturalist. Born and educated in Switzerland, he spent nine years in researches among the glaciers of the mountains of his native country. He proved the former wide extension of the glaciers of Switzerland. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... by reference to the senses, how can there be a contract in its absence any more than if the thing is in popular speech different in kind from its description? The qualities that make sameness or difference of kind for the purposes of a contract are not determined by Agassiz or Darwin, or by the public at large, but by the will of the parties, which decides that for their purposes the characteristics insisted on are such and such. /1/1 Now, if this be true, what evidence can there be that a certain requirement is essential, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... definition of the species. The word has no ABSOLUTE meaning whatever, but is only a group-name, or category of classification, with a purely relative value. In 1857, it is true, a famous and gifted, but inaccurate and dogmatic, scientist, Louis Agassiz, attempted to give an absolute value to these "categories of classification." He did this in his Essay on Classification, in which he turns upside down the phenomena of organic nature, and, instead of tracing ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... Christian Examiner—an able periodical, which no degree or affectation of "liberality" should have tempted to the admission of such a paper—in an elaborate argument against the Unity of the Human Race. It is ridiculous to attempt a disguise of this matter: the proposition of Prof. Agassiz is an attack upon the Christian religion, and he is guilty of scandalous dishonesty in endeavoring to evade its being so considered. He has undoubtedly a right to pursue any investigation to which he may be led by a love of science, and, guarding himself about with humility and candor, he has ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... service. The station at Victoria may be taken as representing the conditions of the southern part of the coast of British Columbia, although the rainfall is much greater on exposed parts of the outer coast. Agassiz represents the Fraser delta and Kamloops the southern interior district. The mean temperature naturally decreases to the northward of these selected stations, both along the coast and in the interior, while the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... objected that it was full of untruths, and that for plain candour it was surpassed by the "Life of Casanova." Of this work (regarding which Carlyle has said, "Whosoever has looked therein, let him wash his hands and be unclean until even") neither Emerson nor Lowell, nor Palfrey nor Agassiz, nor any of the others present seemed to have any knowledge, until Dr. Holmes, who was more adventurous, admitted he knew somewhat thereof. Now, as I had read it thrice through, I knew it pretty well. I reflected on this, but came ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... our stool nearer) all about the sea-anemones and corals, the coral-reefs, the jelly-fishes, star-fishes, and sea-urchins,—which last are not to be confounded with the buoys so frequently to be met with in our harbors. That the stories have the sanction of Agassiz is warrant of their scientific accuracy, while the feminine grace with which they are told is a science to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... shooting one day and met Curtis as he was coming back with his gun over West Boston Bridge. Curtis asked him if he had shot anything. Gray said, "No, nothing but a hawk in Watertown. I stopped at the Museum as I came by, and gave it to Agassiz." "I suppose Agassiz said ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... to comfort sufferers for the faith. St. Francis called the birds and beasts his brothers. Dr. Johnson believed in a future life for animals, as also did Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Jeremy Taylor, Agassiz, Lamartine, and many Christian scholars. It seems as if they ought to have some compensation for their terrible sufferings in this world. Then to go to heaven, animals would only have to take up the thread ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... was, what next? As it happened, the next important event in the Hawthorne family was the advent of their younger daughter, born like Agassiz, "in the lovely month of May," and amid scenery as beautiful as the Pays de Vaud. Her father named her Rose, in defiance of Hillard's objection to idyllic nomenclature; and as a child she seemed much like the spirit of ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... anathemas from the clergy, sarcasm and vituperation from the laity, and a host of replies from writers of all grades. Like his predecessor, the author of the "Vestiges," he might have said, in the words of Agassiz:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Imagination, working in the realms of thought, can turn things true into sciences, and things good into ethical systems. Well did the philosopher say that the greatest star is the one standing at the little end of the telescope, the one looking, not looked at nor looked for. When some Agassiz dredging the Atlantic tells us what animals lived there a million years ago, the scientist's mind seems an abyss deeper than the sea itself; and when Tyndall, climbing to the top of the Matterhorn, reads on that rock-page all the events of the ancient world, the mountain is dwarfed to ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the financial support of the national government during the civil war, and a generous friend of noble men and interests.[17] Nathaniel Thayer was a manager of railroads, erected Thayer Hall at Harvard College, and bore the expenses of Agassiz's expedition to South America. ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... of America were derived it is impossible to say. The date is too remote and the data too few. From fossil remains of human bones, Agassiz estimated a period of at least ten thousand years; and near New Orleans, beneath four buried forests, a skeleton was found which was possibly fifty thousand years old. If, therefore, the redskins branched off from the yellow man, it must have been at a period which lies utterly ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... illustrated by the ancient tree of Porphyry. By this method any subject it is desired to subdivide is first divided by writing the name of one selected species at one branch and writing at the other branch the name of the same species prefixed by "Not." Thus the Agassiz classification of living beings divides them first into sensible and not sensible (plants). A botanical classification divides plants into flowering and not flowering. A zoological classification divides animals into ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... press; he even inflicts it upon leading statesmen by private letters. But these weapons did not succeed. They were like Chinese gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon. Buckland, Pye Smith, Lyell, Silliman, Hitchcock, Murchison, Agassiz, Dana, and a host of of noble champions besides, pressed on the battle for truth was won. And was it won merely for men of science? The whole civilized world declares that it was won for religion; that thereby has infinitely increased the knowledge ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... is a wonderfully rich district. Louis Agassiz first mapped it and wrote a most interesting essay on it. Here was a wonderful prehistoric lake, draining to the south through the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. By a volcanic rise of the land on the southern end, centuries ago, the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... no more interesting and forceful personality than Susan Maria Hallowell, who came to Wellesley as Professor of Natural History in 1875, the friend of Agassiz and Asa Gray. She was a Maine woman, and she had been teaching twenty-two years, in Bangor and Portland, before she was called to Wellesley. Her successor in the Department of Botany writes in a ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... some small fossils from the Downton Sandstones which were supposed to be fish-shields. The peculiarities of structure presented by these aroused his interest, and he began an elaborate series of investigations upon palaeozoic fishes in general. Earlier zooelogists, such as the great Agassiz, had devoted most of their attention to careful and exact description of the different fossil fishes with which they became acquainted. Huxley at once began to investigate the relations that existed ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... suffered came from the criticisms of Baron Cuvier. This genuinely remarkable man had built up the study of comparative anatomy. To him students flocked from all sides. Among these one of the most brilliant was Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist, who later came to this country, filled with Cuvier's ideas. This great teacher believed that species are fixed. He knew better than any man of his times the wonderful similarity in structure between animals of a given class. He attributed this ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... some extent, and I will try to be more faithful to rigid virtue and priority; but as for calling Balanus "Lepas" (which I did not think of) I cannot do it, my pen won't write it—it is impossible. I have great hopes some of my difficulties will disappear, owing to wrong dates in Agassiz and to my having to run several genera into one; for I have as yet gone, in but few cases, to original sources. With respect to adopting my own notions in my Cirripedia book, I should not like to do so without I found others approved, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... enough for all ordinary purposes. There are few such elaborate biographies as those contributed by Macaulay, De Quincey, and others, to the "Encyclopaedia Britannica"; but Mr. Bancroft's "Jonathan Edwards," Mr. Everett's "Hallam," "Washington," and "Daniel Webster," President Felton's "Agassiz," Professor Lowell's "Dante," Professor Schaff's "Luther" and "Melancthon," Mr. Seward's "DeWitt Clinton," A. W. Thayer's "Beethoven," "Handel," "Haydn," and "Mozart," Richard Grant White's "Shakespeare," and the articles on "Patrick Henry," "Washington Irving," "Milton," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... native country. His great contemporary, Euler, was a Swiss, transplanted first to St. Petersburg, then invited by Frederick the Great to become a member of the Berlin Academy, then again attracted to St. Petersburg. Huyghens was transplanted from his native country to Paris. Agassiz was an exotic, brought among us from Switzerland, whose activity during the generation he passed among us was as great and effective as at any time of his life. On the Continent, outside of France, the most eminent professors in the universities have been and still ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb |
