Louis Agassiz as a Teacher | Page 8

the amount of knowledge and experience that the student had previously acquired, and often in line with what the student had done before. Not infrequently young men came to him who were utterly destitute of any knowledge or ability to study natural science, or zoology in particular, but had an idea that it would be a 'soft snap,' as the boys say. In such cases he often did give them a lot of mixed stuff to mull over, to see what they could do, and also to discourage those that seemed unfit. Sometimes he was mistaken, of course, and the student would persevere and stay on--and sometimes turned out well later. In fact, his treatment was highly and essentially individualistic.
In my own case, he questioned me closely as to what I had previously done and learned. He found I had made collections of birds, mammals, plants, etc., and had mounted and identified them for several years, and in that way was not a beginner exactly. I remember that before I had been with him six months he told me I knew more zoology than most students did when they graduated. Therefore my case was not like some others. He had an idea, of course, that though I had collected and mounted birds, and knew their names and habits, I probably knew little about their anatomy. At any rate the first thing he did was to give me a badly mutilated old loon, from old alcohol, telling me to prepare the skeleton. This I did so well and so quickly that he expressed regret that he had not given me some better bird with unbroken bones. He gave me next a blue heron, but it being spring, I 'went collecting' in the vicinity, following my usual inclination, before breakfast and after laboratory hours, and brought in a number of incubated birds'-eggs. When Agassiz came into the laboratory, I was extracting and preserving the embryos, being interested in embryology. He at once exclaimed that he was delighted, and told me to put aside the skeletons and go right on with collecting and preparing embryo birds, and making drawings, etc. This I did all that season, obtaining about 2,000 embryos, mostly of sea birds, for he sent me to Grand Manan Island, etc., for that purpose. Before the end of the first year he gave me entire charge of the birds and mammals in the Museum, as well as the coral collection, which was large even then.
In the case of Hyatt, who went there just before I did, I think he was kept working over a lot of mixed fish skeletons, more or less broken, to 'see what he could make of them.' A little later he put Hyatt at work on the Unionidae, studying the anatomy as well as the shells. Within two years he put him on the Ammonites, a big collection having been received from Europe at that time. Hyatt, however, had never done anything in zoology or botany before he went to Agassiz and he found it hard to get a beginning, and so lost time. I mention these cases to show how different his methods were in different cases.

VI
HOW AGASSIZ TAUGHT PROFESSOR WILDER
[Footnote: From an article by Professor Burt G. Wilder, of Cornell University, in _The Harvard Graduates' Magazine_, June, 1907. The extract is taken from a reprint with slight changes by the author, and is given with slight omissions by the present writer.]
The phrase adopted as the title of this article ['Louis Agassiz, Teacher'] begins his simple will, Agassiz was likewise an investigator, a director of research, and the founder of a great museum. He really was four men in one. Without detracting from the extent and value of the three other elements of his intense and composite American life-- from his first course of lectures before the Lowell Institute in 1846 to the inauguration of the Anderson Summer School of Natural History at Penikese Island, July 8, 1873, and his address before the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, twelve days before his untimely death on December 14, 1873,--Agassiz was pre-eminently a teacher. He taught his assistants; he taught the teachers in the public schools; he taught college students; he taught the public, and the common people heard him gladly. His unparalleled achievements as an instructor are thus chronicled by his wife:
'A teacher in the widest sense, he sought and found his pupils in every class. But in America for the first time did he come into contact with the general mass of the people on this common ground, and it influenced strongly his final resolve to remain in this country. Indeed the secret of his greatest power was to be found in the sympathetic, human side of his character. Out of his broad humanity grew the