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 Linnaeus 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.
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