Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1.

1807-1827: TO AGE 20.

Birthplace.
Influence of his Mother.
Early Love of Natural History.
Boyish Occupations.
Domestic Education.
First School.
Vacations.
Commercial Life renounced.
College of Lausanne.
Choice of Profession.
Medical School of Zurich.
Life and Studies there.
University of Heidelberg.
Studies interrupted by Illness.
Return to Switzerland.
Occupations during Convalescence.

JEAN LOUIS RODOLPHE AGASSIZ was born May 28, 1807, at the village of Motier, on the Lake of Morat. His father, Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, was a clergyman; his mother, Rose Mayor, was the daughter of a physician whose home was at Cudrefin, on the shore of the Lake of Neuchatel.

The parsonages in Switzerland are frequently pretty and picturesque. That of Motier, looking upon the lake and sheltered by a hill which commands a view over the whole chain of the Bernese Alps, was especially so. It possessed a vineyard large enough to add something in good years to the small salary of the pastor; an orchard containing, among other trees, an apricot famed the country around for the unblemished beauty of its abundant fruit; a good vegetable garden, and a delicious spring of water flowing always fresh and pure into a great stone basin behind the house. That stone basin was Agassiz's first aquarium; there he had his first collection of fishes.* (* After his death a touching tribute was paid to his memory by the inhabitants of his birthplace. With appropriate ceremonies, a marble slab was placed above the door of the parsonage of Motier, with this inscription, "J. Louis Agassiz, celebre naturaliste, est ne dans cette maison, le 28 Mai, 1807.")

It does not appear that he had any precocious predilection for study, and his parents, who for the first ten years of his life were his only teachers, were too wise to stimulate his mind beyond the ordinary attainments of his age. having lost her first four children in infancy, his mother watched with trembling solicitude over his early years. It was perhaps for this reason that she was drawn so closely to her boy, and understood that his love of nature, and especially of all living things, was an intellectual tendency, and not simply a child's disposition to find friends and playmates in the animals about him. In later years her sympathy gave her the key to the work of his manhood, as it had done to the sports of his childhood. She remained his most intimate friend to the last hour of her life, and he survived her but six years.

Louis's love of natural history showed itself almost from infancy. When a very little fellow he had, beside his collection of fishes, all sorts of pets: birds, field-mice, hares, rabbits, guinea-pigs, etc., whose families he reared with the greatest care. Guided by his knowledge of the haunts and habits of fishes, he and his brother Auguste became the most adroit of young fishermen,—using processes all their own and quite independent of hook, line, or net. Their hunting grounds were the holes and crevices beneath the stones or in the water-washed walls of the lake shore....