most blustering folio of them all will turn as pale as if it were bound in law-calf, if he only lay his hand on its shoulder.
Nor, lastly, can any elevation of aim, any thirst for the divine springs of knowledge, enable a man to dispense with the sober habits of observation and the positive acquirements that must give him the stamina to attempt the higher flights of thought. The eagle's wings are nothing without his pectoral muscles. It is not Swedenborg and his disciples that legislate for the scientific world; they may suggest truth, but they rarely prove it, and never bring it into such systematic forms as narrow-minded Nature will insist on laying down.
That all these qualities which go to make up our ideal should exist in absolute perfection in any single man of mortal birth is not to be expected. But there are names in the history of Science which recall so imposing a combination of these several gifts, that, comparing the men who bore them with the civilization of their time, we can hardly conceive that uninspired intellect should come nearer the imaginary standard. Such a man was Aristotle. The slender and close-shaven fop, with the showy mantle on his ungraceful person and the costly rings on his fingers, who hung on the lips of Plato for twenty years, and trained the boy of Macedon to whatever wisdom he possessed,—whose life was set by destiny between the greatest of thinkers and the greatest of conquerors,—seems to have borrowed the intellect of the one and the universal aspirations of the other. But because he invaded every realm of knowledge, it must not be thought he dealt with Nature at second-hand. He was a collector and a dissector. He could display the anatomical structure of a fish as well as write a treatise on the universe or on rhetoric, or government or logic, or music or mathematics. Dethroned we call him; and yet Mr. Agassiz quotes his descriptions with respect, and confesses that the systematic classification of animals makes but one stride from Aristotle to Linnæus.
Cuvier was such a man. Alone, and unapproached in his own spheres of knowledge, his "Report on the Progress of the Natural Sciences" is only an index to the wide range of his intellect. In one point, however, we must own that he seems slow of apprehension or limited by preconceived opinions,—in his reception of the homologies pointed out by Oken and the Physiophilosophical observers.
In the same range of intellects we should reckon Linnæus and Humboldt, and should have reckoned Goethe, had he given himself to science.
We do not assume to say where in the category of fully equipped intelligences Mr. Agassiz belongs. But if the union of the most extraordinary observing powers with an almost poetic perception of analogies, with a wide compass of thought, the classifying instinct and habit, large knowledge of books, and personal intimacy with the leaders in various departments of knowledge, and with this the upward-looking aspect of mind and heart, which is the crowning gift of all,—if the union of these qualities can give to the man of science a claim to the nobler name of wisdom, it is not flattery, but justice, to award this distinction to Mr. Agassiz.
To him, then, we listen, when, after having sounded every note in the wide gamut of Nature, after reading the story of life as it stands written in the long series of records reaching from Cambrian fossils to ovarian germs, after tracing the divine principle of order from the starlike flower at his feet to the flower-like circle of planets which spreads its fiery corolla, in obedience to the same simple law that disposes the leaves of the growing plant,—as our eminent mathematician tells us,—he relates in simple and reverential accents the highest truths he has learned in traversing God's mighty universe. For him, and such as him,—for us, too, if we read wisely,—the toiling slaves of science, often working with little consciousness of the full proportions of the edifice they are helping to con-
