Agassiz's general faith in the susceptibility of the popular intelligence, however untrained, to the highest truths of nature, was contagious, and he created or developed that in which he believed. In Neuchatel the presence of the young professor was felt at once as a new and stimulating influence. The little town suddenly became a centre of scientific activity. A society for the pursuit of the natural sciences, of which he was the first secretary, sprang into life. The scientific collections, which had already attained, under the care of M. Louis Coulon, considerable value, presently assumed the character and proportions of a well-ordered museum. In M. Coulon Agassiz found a generous friend and a scientific colleague who sympathized with his noblest aspirations, and was ever ready to sustain all his efforts in behalf of scientific progress. Together they worked in arranging, enlarging, and building up a museum of natural history which soon became known as one of the best local institutions of the kind in Europe. Beside his classes at the gymnasium, Agassiz collected about him, by invitation, a small audience of friends and neighbors, to whom he lectured during the winter on botany, on zoology, on the philosophy of nature. The instruction was of the most familiar and informal character, and was continued in later years for his own children and the children of his friends. In the latter case the subjects were chiefly geology and geography in connection with botany, and in favorable weather the lessons were usually given in the open air. One can easily imagine what joy it must have been for a party of little playmates, boys and girls, to be taken out for long walks in the country over the hills about Neuchatel, and especially to Chaumont, the mountain which rises behind it, and thus to have their lessons, for which the facts and scenes about them furnished subject and illustration, combined with pleasant rambles. From some high ground affording a wide panoramic view Agassiz would explain to them the formation of lakes, islands, rivers, springs, water-sheds, hills, and valleys. He always insisted that physical geography could be better taught to children in the vicinity of their own homes than by books or maps, or even globes. Nor did he think a varied landscape essential to such instruction. Undulations of the ground, some contrast of hill and plain, some sheet of water with the streams that feed it, some ridge of rocky soil acting as a water-shed, may be found everywhere, and the relation of facts shown perhaps as well on a small as on a large scale.