The result of this expedition was a valuable collection of fishes
and a report upon the fauna and the geology of Lake Superior,
comprising the erratic phenomena. A narrative written by James
Elliot Cabot formed the introduction to the report, and it was also
accompanied by two or three shorter contributions on special
subjects from other members of the party. The volume was
illustrated by a number of plates exquisitely drawn and colored on
stone by A. Sonrel.
This was not Agassiz's first publication in America. His
"Principles of Zoology" (Agassiz and Gould) was published in 1848.
The book had a large sale, especially for schools. Edition followed
edition, but the sale of the first part was checked by the want of
the second, which was never printed. Agassiz was always swept along
so rapidly by the current of his own activity that he was sometimes
forced to leave behind him unfinished work. Before the time came
for the completion of the second part of the zoology, his own
knowledge had matured so much, that to be true to the facts, he
must have remodeled the whole of the first part, and for this he
never found the time. Apropos of these publications the following
letters are in place.
FROM SIR RODERICK MURCHISON.
BELGRAVE SQUARE, October 3, 1849.
. . .I thank you very sincerely for your most captivating general
work on the "Principles of Zoology." I am quite in love with it. I
was glad to find that you had arranged the nummulites with the
tertiary rocks, so that the broad generalization I attempted in my
last work on the Alps, Apennines, and Carpathians is completely
sustained zoologically, and you will not be sorry to see the
stratigraphical truth vindicated (versus E. de Beaumont and--). I
beseech you to look at my memoir, and especially at my reasoning
about the miocene and pliocene divisions of the Alps and Italy. It
seems to me manifest that the percentage system derived from marine
life can never be applied to tertiary TERRESTRIAL successions. . .
My friends have congratulated me much on this my last effort, and
as Lyell and others most interested in opposing me have been
forward in approval, I begin to hope that I am not yet quite done
up; and that unlike the Bishop of Oviedo, my last sermon "ne sent
pas de l'apoplexie." I have, nevertheless, been desperately out of
sorts and full of gout and liver and all kinds of irritation this
summer, which is the first for many a long year in which I have
been unable to take the field. The meeting at Birmingham, however,
revived me. Professor W. Rogers will have told you all about our
doings. Buckland is up to his neck in "sewage," and wishes to
change all underground London into a fossil cloaca of pseudo
coprolites. This does not quite suit the chemists charged with
sanitary responsibilities; for they fear the Dean will poison half
the population in preparing his choice manures! But in this as in
everything he undertakes there is a grand sweeping view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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