"I can easily understand that the brilliant offers made you in Paris strongly counterbalance a poor little professorship of natural history at Neuchatel, and may well cause you to hesitate; especially since your scientific career there is so well begun. On the other hand, you cannot doubt our pleasure in the prospect of having you at Neuchatel, not only because of the friendship felt for you by many persons here, but also on account of the lustre which a chair of natural history so filled would shed upon our institution. Of this our subscribers are well aware, and it accounts for the rapid filling of the list. I am very anxious, as are all these gentlemen, to know your decision, and beg you therefore to let us hear from you as soon as possible." A letter from Humboldt to M. Coulon, about this time, is an earnest of his watchful care over the interests of Agassiz. HUMBOLDT TO LOUIS COULON. POTSDAM, July 25, 1832. . . .I do not write to ask a favor, but only to express my warm gratitude for your noble and generous dealings with the young savant, M. Agassiz, who is well worthy your encouragement and the protection of your government. He is distinguished by his talents, by the variety and substantial character of his attainments, and by that which has a special value in these troubled times, his natural sweetness of disposition. Through our common friend, M. von Buch, I have known for many years that you study natural history with a success equal to your zeal, and that you have brought together fine collections, which you place at the disposal of others with a noble liberality. It gratifies me to see your kindness toward a young man to whom I am so warmly attached; whom the illustrious Cuvier, also, whose loss we must ever deplore, would have recommended with the same heartiness, for his faith, like mine, was based on those admirable works of Agassiz which are now nearly completed. . . I have strongly advised M. Agassiz not to accept the offers made to him at Paris since M. Cuvier's death, and his decision has anticipated my advice. How happy it would be for him, and for the completion of the excellent works on which he is engaged, could he this very year be established on the shores of your lake! I have no doubt that he will receive the powerful protection of your worthy governor, to whom I shall repeat my requests, and who honors me, as well as my brother, with a friendship I warmly appreciate. M. von Buch also has promised me, before leaving Berlin for Bonn and Vienna, to add his entreaty to mine. . .He is almost as much interested as myself in M. Agassiz and his work on fossil fishes, the most important ever undertaken, and equally exact in its relation to zoological characters and to geological deposits. . . The next letter from Agassiz to his influential friend is written after his final acceptance of the Neuchatel professorship. AGASSIZ TO HUMBOLDT. PARIS, July, 1832.