Читать книгу Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence - Louis Agassiz - Страница 72

ORBE, December 3, 1829.

. . .I will devote an hour of this last evening I am to pass in Orbe, to talking with you. You will wonder that I am still here, and that I have not written. You already know that I have been arranging my collections at Cudrefin, and spending very happy days with my grandfather. But he is now very ill, and even should we have better news of him to-day, the thought weighs heavily on my heart, that I must take leave of him when he is perhaps on his death-bed. . .I have just tied up my last package of plants, and there lies my whole herbarium in order,—thirty packages in all. For this I have to thank you, dear Alex, and it gives me pleasure to tell you so and to be reminded of it. What a succession of glorious memories came up to me as I turned them over. Free from all disturbing incidents, I enjoyed anew our life together, and even more, if possible, than in actual experience. Every talk, every walk, was present to me again, and in reviewing it all I saw how our minds had been drawn to each other in an ever-strengthening union. In you I see my own intellectual development reflected as in a mirror, for to you, and to my intercourse with you, I owe my entrance upon this path of the noblest and most lasting enjoyment. It is delightful to look back on such a past with the future so bright before us. . .

Agassiz now returned to Munich to add the title of Doctor of Medicine to that of Doctor of Philosophy. A case of somnambulism, which fell under his observation and showed him disease, or, at least, abnormal action of the brain, under an aspect which was new to him, seems to have given a fresh impulse to his medical studies, and, for a time, he was inclined to believe that the vocation which had thus far been to him one of necessity, might become one of preference. But the naturalist was stronger than the physician. During this very winter, when he was preparing himself with new earnestness for his profession, a collection of fossil fishes was put into his hands by the Director of the Museum of Munich. It will be seen with what ardor he threw himself into this new investigation. His work on the "Poissons Fossiles," which placed him in a few years in the front rank of European scientific men, took form at once in his fertile brain.