"Select such subjects that your pupils can not walk without seeing them. Train your pupils to be observers, and have them provided with the specimens about which you speak. It you can find nothing better, take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen and examine it as you talk."
"In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general."
"There is no part of the country where in the summer you can not get a sufficient supply of the best specimens. Teach your children to bring them in yourselves. Take your text from the brooks not from the booksellers. It is better to have a few forms well known than to teach a little about many hundred species. Better a dozen specimens thoroughly studied as the result of the first year's work, than to have two thousand dollars' worth of shells and corals bought from a curiosity-shop. The dozen animals would be your own."
"You[1] will find the same elements of instruction all about you wherever you may be teaching. You can take your classes out and give them the same lessons, and lead them up to the same subjects you are yourselves studying here. And this method of teaching children is so natural, so suggestive, so true. That is the charm of teaching from Nature herself. No one can warp her to suit his own views. She brings us back to absolute truth as often as we wander."
"The study of Nature is an intercourse with the highest mind. You should never trifle with Nature. At the lowest her works are the works of the highest powers, the highest something in whatever way we may look at it."
"A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory."
"In Europe I have been accused of taking my scientific ideas from the Church. In America I have been called a heretic because I will not let my church-going friends pat me on the head." Of all these lectures the most valuable and the most charming were those on the glaciers. In these the master spoke, and every rock on our island was a mute witness to the truth of his words.
- ↑ In this paragraph, quoted by Mrs. Agassiz (Life and Letters of Agassiz, p. 775), I have adopted the wording as given by her.
