shall be especially pleased, because it may be long before I can begin to publish it myself, and many may be interested in it. This seems to me the most important of my results, though I have also, partly from perfect specimens, partly from fragments, identified some five hundred extinct species, and more than fifty extinct genera, beside reestablishing three families no longer represented. Cotta has written me in very polite terms that he could not undertake anything new at present; he would rather pay, without regard to profit, for what has been done thus far, and lets me have fifteen hundred francs. This makes it possible for me to leave Dinkel in Paris to complete the drawings. Although it often seems to me hard, I must reconcile myself to the thought of leaving investigations which are actually completed, locked up in my desk. . . CHAPTER 7. 1832-1834: AGE 25-27. Enters upon his Professorship at Neuchatel. First Lecture. Success as a Teacher. Love of Teaching. Influence upon the Scientific Life of Neuchatel. Proposal from University of Heidelberg. Proposal declined. Threatened Blindness. Correspondence with Humboldt. Marriage. Invitation from Charpentier. Invitation to visit England. Wollaston Prize. First Number of "Poissons Fossiles." Review of the Work. THE following autumn Agassiz assumed the duties of his professorship at Neuchatel. His opening lecture "Upon the Relations between the different branches of Natural History and the then prevailing tendencies of all the Sciences" was given on the 12th of November, 1832, at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon the listeners as recorded at the time, this introductory discourse must have been characterized by the same broad spirit of generalization which marked Agassiz's later teaching. Facts in his hands fell into their orderly relation as parts of a connected whole, and were never presented merely as special or isolated phenomena. From the beginning his success as an instructor was undoubted. He had, indeed, now entered upon the occupation which was to be from youth to old age the delight of his life. Teaching was a passion with him, and his power over his pupils might be measured by his own enthusiasm. He was intellectually, as well as socially, a democrat, in the best sense. He delighted to scatter broadcast the highest results of thought and research, and to adapt them even to the youngest and most uninformed minds. In his later American travels he would talk of glacial phenomena to the driver of a country stage-coach among the mountains, or to some workman, splitting rock at the road-side, with as much earnestness as if he had been discussing problems with a brother geologist; he would take the common fisherman into his scientific confidence, telling him the intimate secrets of fish structure or fish-embryology, till the man in his turn grew enthusiastic, and began to pour out information from the stores of his own rough and untaught habits of observation.