his holiest aspirations, stood, like the Alps whose shadow fell upon its birthplace, the lovely Lausaune, pride of the Pays de Vaud. The clepsydræ that measure the centuries as they drop from the dizzy cliffs—the glaciers, by the descent of which "time is marked out, as by a shadow on a dial," and which thunder out the high noon of each revolving year with their frozen tongues, as they crack beneath the summer's sun—have registered a new centennial circle, and at the very hour of its completion, Switzerland vindicates her ancient renown in these fair pages, at once pledge and performance, of another of her honored children. May the auspicious omen lead to as happy a conclusion!
Lovingly, then, we lay open the generous quarto and look upon its broad, bright title-page. It tells us that we have here the first of a series of "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America." We see that one of its three parts embraces the largest generalities of Natural Science, under the head of an "Essay on Classification." We see that the other two parts are devoted to the description and delineation of a single order of Reptilia,—the Testudinata, or "Turtles."
If Mr. Agassiz had intentionally chosen the simplest way of proving that he had naturalized himself in New England, he could not have selected more fortunately than he has done by adopting our word Turtle to cover all the Testudinates. To an Englishman a turtle is a sea-monster, that for a brief space lies on his back and fights the air with his useless paddles in the bow-window of a provision-shop, bound eventually to Guildhall, there to feed Gog and Magog, or his worshippers, known as aldermen. For him a land-testudinate is a tortoise. When his poets and romancers speak of turtles, again, they commonly mean turtle-doves.
"Not half so swift the sailing falcon flies
That drives a turtle through the liquid skies."
The only flight of a testudinate which we remember is that downward one of the unfortunate tortoise that cracked the bald crown of Æschylus. But turtle, as embracing all chelonians, or, as liberal shepherds call it, "turkle," is unquestionably Cisatlantic. The distinguished naturalist has made himself an American citizen by adopting our own expression, and should have the freedom of all our cities presented to him in the shell of a box-turtle.
It is singular to recall the honors which have been bestowed on the testudinates from all antiquity. It was the sun-dried and sinew-strung shell of a tortoise that suggested the lyre to Mercury, as he walked by the shore of Nilus. It was on the back of a tortoise that the Indian sage placed his elephant which upheld the world. Under the testudo the Roman legions swarmed into the walled cities of the orbis terrarum. And in that wise old fable which childhood learns, and age too often remembers, sorrowing, it was the tortoise that won the race against the swiftest of the smaller tribes, his competitor.
And here once more we have his shell strung with vibrating thoughts that repeat the harmonies of nature. Once more his broad back stoops to the weighty problems which the planet proposes to its children. Once more the great cities are stormed—by science—beneath his coat of mail. Once more he has run the race, not against the hare only, but the whole animal kingdom, and won it, and with it the new fame which awaits him, as he leads in the long array of his fellows that are to come up, one by one, in these enduring records. And so we turn the leaf, and come to the Dedication.
The Dedication of a work like this, destined to preserve all the names it enrols in the sculpture-like immortality of science, naturally delays us for a moment. Of the foreign teacher and friend to whom the author owes some of his earliest lessons, and of that group of our own citizens, most of them still living, who lent their united efforts to the enterprise of publication after it was commenced,
