True; and to this day, if I attempt a fish, I can draw nothing but haemulons.
The fourth day, a second fish of the same group was placed beside the first, and I was bidden to point out the resemblances and differences between the two; another and another followed, until the entire family lay before me, and a whole legion of jars covered the table and surrounding shelves; the odor had become a pleasant perfume; and even now, the sight of an old, six-inch, worm-eaten cork brings fragrant memories.
The whole group of haemulons was thus brought in review; and, whether engaged upon the dissection of the internal organs, the preparation and examination of the bony frame-work, or the description of the various parts, Agassiz's training in the method of observing facts and their orderly arrangement was ever accompanied by the urgent exhortation not to be content with them.
'Facts are stupid things,' he would say, 'until brought into connection with some general law.'
At the end of eight months, it was almost with reluctance that I left these friends and turned to insects; but what I had gained by this outside experience has been of greater value than years of later investigation in my favorite groups.
[Footnote: Professor Edward S. Morse writes: 'As I remember Mr. Scudder's article, … he has stated clearly the method of Agassiz's teaching—simply to let the student study intimately one object at a time. Day after day he would come to your table and ask you what you had learned, and thus keep you at it for a week. My first object put before me was a common clam, Mya arenaria.']
VIII
THE DEATH OF AGASSIZ—HIS PERSONALITY
[Footnote: The materials for this sketch are drawn from several sources—chiefly the Life by Marcou (which I have used with some caution) and the Life by Mrs. Agassiz. I had wished to preserve the words of Marcou throughout (with judicious omissions), but this wish was defeated by certain persons who, for reasons unknown to me, have the power to prevent the use of adequate quotations from him. I have followed him where I had no other guide, and no ground for suspecting him of bias. The composition, and to some extent the interpretation of the facts, are my own.]
In later years the robust constitution and herculean frame of Agassiz showed the effects of his extraordinary and multifarious labors, for it must be confessed that he was not careful of his bodily welfare. In the year 1869 he suffered a temporary breakdown of a very threatening sort, and for months was in seclusion, forbidden by his medical advisers even to think. His own wise efforts, and a quiet spring passed in the village of Deerfield, Connecticut, brought about his recovery, so that three years of activity were yet to be vouchsafed him. But the strain of his lectures, of his correspondence, of his labors at and for the Museum, was perilous. On the second of December, 1873, he gave a lecture, his last, on 'The Structural Growth of Domestic Animals,' before the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture at Fitchburg. On the third he dined with friends; on the fifth he was present at a family gathering—and smoked cigars, defying the orders of his physician. But the end was not far off. He spoke of a dimness of sight; he complained of feeling 'strangely asleep.' On the morning of the sixth he went as usual to the Museum, but with a sense of great weariness he shortly returned to his room, where he lay down, never to depart from it alive. The disease was a paralysis of the organs of respiration, beginning with the larynx. He had every care from his friends Dr. Brown-Sequard, who immediately came from New York, and Dr. Morrill Wyman; and the last few days of his life were passed, not in great suffering, with his loving family around him. Nothing, however, could arrest the progress of the malady.