Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence | Page 4

his death
a touching tribute was paid to his memory by the inhabitants of his
birthplace. With appropriate ceremonies, a marble slab was placed
above the door of the parsonage of Motier, with this inscription, "J.
Louis Agassiz, celebre naturaliste, est ne dans cette maison, le 28 Mai,
1807.")
It does not appear that he had any precocious predilection for study,
and his parents, who for the first ten years of his life were his only
teachers, were too wise to stimulate his mind beyond the ordinary
attainments of his age. having lost her first four children in infancy, his
mother watched with trembling solicitude over his early years. It was
perhaps for this reason that she was drawn so closely to her boy, and
understood that his love of nature, and especially of all living things,
was an intellectual tendency, and not simply a child's disposition to find
friends and playmates in the animals about him. In later years her
sympathy gave her the key to the work of his manhood, as it had done
to the sports of his childhood. She remained his most intimate friend to
the last hour of her life, and he survived her but six years.
Louis's love of natural history showed itself almost from infancy. When

a very little fellow he had, beside his collection of fishes, all sorts of
pets: birds, field-mice, hares, rabbits, guinea-pigs, etc., whose families
he reared with the greatest care. Guided by his knowledge of the haunts
and habits of fishes, he and his brother Auguste became the most adroit
of young fishermen,--using processes all their own and quite
independent of hook, line, or net. Their hunting grounds were the holes
and crevices beneath the stones or in the water-washed walls of the lake
shore. No such shelter was safe from their curious fingers, and they
acquired such dexterity that when bathing they could seize the fish even
in the open water, attracting them by little arts to which the fish
submitted as to a kind of fascination. Such amusements are no doubt
the delight of many a lad living in the country, nor would they be worth
recording except as illustrating the unity of Agassiz's intellectual
development from beginning to end. His pet animals suggested
questions, to answer which was the task of his life; and his intimate
study of the fresh-water fishes of Europe, later the subject of one of his
important works, began with his first collection from the Lake of
Morat.
As a boy he amused himself also with all kinds of handicrafts on a
small scale. The carpenter, the cobbler, the tailor, were then as much
developed in him as the naturalist. In Swiss villages it was the habit in
those days for the trades-people to go from house to house in their
different vocations. The shoemaker came two or three times a year with
all his materials, and made shoes for the whole family by the day; the
tailor came to fit them for garments which he made in the house; the
cooper arrived before the vintage, to repair old barrels and hogsheads
or to make new ones, and to replace their worn-out hoops; in short, to
fit up the cellar for the coming season. Agassiz seems to have profited
by these lessons as much as by those he learned from his father; and
when a very little fellow, he could cut and put together a well-fitting
pair of shoes for his sisters' dolls, was no bad tailor, and could make a
miniature barrel that was perfectly water-tight. He remembered these
trivial facts as a valuable part of his incidental education. He said he
owed much of his dexterity in manipulation, to the training of eye and
hand gained in these childish plays.

Though fond of quiet, in-door occupation, he was an active, daring boy.
One winter day when about seven years of age, he was skating with his
little brother Auguste, two years younger than himself, and a number of
other boys, near the shore of the lake. They were talking of a great fair
held that day at the town of Morat, on the opposite side of the lake, to
which M. Agassiz had gone in the morning, not crossing upon the ice,
however, but driving around the shore. The temptation was too strong
for Louis, and he proposed to Auguste that they should skate across,
join their father at the fair, and come home with him in the afternoon.
They started accordingly. The other boys remained on their skating
ground till twelve o'clock, the usual dinner hour, when they returned to
the village. Mme. Agassiz was watching for her boys, thinking them
rather late, and on inquiring for them among the troop of urchins
coming down the village street she learned