Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence | Page 6

was elastic; there was no question about numbers, for all came who could; the more, the merrier, with no diminution of good cheer.
The Sunday after Easter was the great popular fete. Then every house was busy coloring Easter eggs and making fritters. The young girls and the lads of the village, the former in their prettiest dresses and the latter with enormous bouquets of artificial flowers in their hats, went together to church in the morning. In the afternoon the traditional match between two runners, chosen from the village youths, took place. They were dressed in white, and adorned with bright ribbons. With music before them, and followed by all the young people, they went in procession to the place where a quantity of Easter eggs had been distributed upon the ground. At a signal the runners separated, the one to pick up the eggs according to a prescribed course, the other to run to the next village and back again. The victory was to the one who accomplished his task first, and he was proclaimed king of the feast. Hand in hand the runners, followed as before by all their companions, returned to join in the dance now to take place before the house of Dr. Mayor. After a time the festivities were interrupted by a little address in patois from the first musician, who concluded by announcing from his platform a special dance in honor of the family of Dr. Mayor. In this dance the family with some of their friends and neighbors took part,--the young ladies dancing with the peasant lads and the young gentlemen with the girls of the village,--while the rest formed a circle to look on.
Thus, between study and recreation, the four years which Agassiz's father and mother intended he should pass at Bienne drew to a close. A yellow, time-worn sheet of foolscap, on which during the last year of his school-life he wrote his desiderata in the way of books, tells something of his progress and his aspirations at fourteen years of age. "I wish," so it runs, "to advance in the sciences, and for that I need d'Anville, Ritter, an Italian dictionary, a Strabo in Greek, Mannert and Thiersch; and also the works of Malte-Brun and Seyfert. I have resolved, as far as I am allowed to do so, to become a man of letters, and at present I can go no further: 1st, in ancient geography, for I already know all my notebooks, and I have only such books as Mr. Rickly can lend me; I must have d'Anville or Mannert; 2nd, in modern geography, also, I have only such books as Mr. Rickly can lend me, and the Osterwald geography, which does not accord with the new divisions; I must have Ritter or Malte-Brun; 3rd, for Greek I need a new grammar, and I shall choose Thiersch; 4th, I have no Italian dictionary, except one lent me by Mr. Moltz; I must have one; 5th, for Latin I need a larger grammar than the one I have, and I should like Seyfert; 6th, Mr. Rickly tells me that as I have a taste for geography he will give me a lesson in Greek (gratis), in which we would translate Strabo, provided I can find one. For all this I ought to have about twelve louis. I should like to stay at Bienne till the month of July, and afterward serve my apprenticeship in commerce at Neuchatel for a year and a half. Then I should like to pass four years at a university in Germany, and finally finish my studies at Paris, where I would stay about five years. Then, at the age of twenty-five, I could begin to write."
Agassiz's note-books, preserved by his parents, who followed the education of their children with the deepest interest, give evidence of his faithful work both at school and college. They form a great pile of manuscript, from the paper copy-books of the school-boy to the carefully collated reports of the college student, begun when the writer was ten or eleven years of age and continued with little interruption till he was eighteen or nineteen. The later volumes are of nearly quarto size and very thick, some of them containing from four to six hundred closely covered pages; the handwriting is small, no doubt for economy of space, but very clear. The subjects are physiological, pathological, and anatomical, with more or less of general natural history. This series of books is kept with remarkable neatness. Even in the boy's copy-books, containing exercises in Greek, Latin, French and German, with compositions on a variety of topics, the writing is even and distinct, with scarcely a blot or an erasure. From the very beginning there is a careful division of subjects under clearly marked