Unless Nuttall has arrived, which I do not hear of, it is too late for him till next fall; for his object was to secure three months’ absence out of the present year, and three out of next.[148] January 24, 1847. Agassiz has finished his lectures with great eclât--most admirable course--and on Thursday evening last he volunteered an additional one in French, which was fine. I gave you the explanation you asked for in my last letter, which I still hope you will find. What I then said about the excellent tone of his lectures generally was fully sustained to the last; they have been good lectures on natural theology. The whole spirit was vastly above that of any geological course I ever heard, his refutation of Lamarckian or “Vestiges” views most pointed and repeated. The whole course was planned on a very high ground, and his references to the Creator were so natural and unconstrained as to show that they were never brought in for effect. The points that I. A. Smith has got hold of were a few words at the close of his lecture on the geographical distribution of animals, in which he applied the views he maintains (which are those of Schouw still further extended) to man. He thinks that animals and plants were originally created in numbers, occupying considerable area, perhaps almost as large as they now occupy. I should mention that he opposes Lyell and others who maintain that very many of the Tertiary species are the same as those now existing. He believes there is not one such, but that there was an entirely new creation at the commencement of the historic era, which is all we want to harmonize geology with Genesis. Now, as to man he maintains distinctly that they are all one species. But he does not believe that the Negro and Malay races descended from the sons of Noah, but had a distinct origin. This, you will see, is merely an extension of his general view. We should not receive it, rejecting it on other than scientific grounds, of which he does not feel the force as we do. But so far from bringing this against the Bible, he brings the Bible to sustain his views, thus appealing to its authority instead of endeavoring to overthrow it. He shows from it (conclusively) that all the sons of Noah (Ham with the rest) were the fathers of the extant Caucasian races,--races which have remained nearly unaltered from the first, and that if any negroes proceeded from Ham’s descendants, it must have been by a miracle. That is the upshot of the matter. We may reject his conclusions, but we cannot find fault with his spirit, and I shall be glad to know that Dr. I. A. Smith, in the whole course of his public teaching, has displayed a reverence for the Bible equal to that of Agassiz. I have been on the most intimate terms with him: I never heard him express an opinion or a word adverse to the claims of revealed religion. His admirable lectures on embryology contain the most original and fundamental confutation of materialism I ever heard.