restless forest-drama unrolled itself before his picture-making, his story-weaving imagination. If you can fancy a 'movie' without sentimentality, a 'movie' firmly documented, unwaveringly just, with every landscape sharply focussed, every portrait clear, every action motivated, then I submit that you would have something like the effect which Parkman's twelve volumes convey. And his nerves paid the price of his self-absorption in his theme. "The poet writes the history of his own body,' said Thoreau. But so does the historian, and every artist who puts himself into his books. It is as true of Tacitus and Carlyle as of Dickens and Victor Hugo. Parkman lived passionately with his characters for fifty years. With every instinct urging him to a life of action rather than contemplation, he was forced to sit for long years in his wheel-chair and see that splendid swift procession of his heroes pass-priests and soldiers, statesmen and savages, against a background of eternally living Nature where the woods break into leaf and then turn to gold or scarlet, where the pitiless rains fall and the snow-drifts melt into the floods of spring-pageantry all, passing, passing, with men withering like leaves and newer generations pressing on, pageantry and heroism and martyrdom and dreams of empire, until that stormy September morning upon the Plains of Abraham when the dying General Wolfe knew that he had won.

To have had his first glimpse of that unforgettable story-picture in boyhood, to keep it steadily in focus through the tortured years of manhood, patiently adding his pitiful five or six lines a day, but never yielding to despair, never abandoning his theme — I maintain that that achievement of a motor-minded cripple was as gallant and glorious an exploit as anything achieved by any of Parkman's heroes.

Francis Parkman belonged, no doubt, to what New-Englanders were once fond of calling 'the old dispensation.' He could not have accommodated himself to some twentieth-century conceptions. He distrusted democracy, and democracy is in the saddle, though here and there a dictator may be leading the horse. He disliked woman suffrage. He hated sentimentality, and sentimentality engulfs us. There is a demand just now in the United States that American history should be rewritten, not in the interest of

Truth, but in the interest of some racial or religious or ancestorworshipping group. I should enjoy hearing Parkman's comments on this contemporary insolence; for he commanded, in his rare moments of unrepressed indignation, a vigorous, not to say profane, vocabulary.

But it may likewise be true that Parkman would be deaf to some of the finer voices of the twentieth century, as he was certainly deaf to the more spiritual accents of seventeenth-century mysticism. It would have been hard for him to think internationally for he had, I imagine, less faith in World Courts and Leagues of Nations than he had in the sword, held by firm and able hands. Parkman was a Stoic, in philosophy as in life. He would perhaps retort that his life-work was not to dream of a new heaven and a new earth, but to give the actual record of the American wilderness. And we may say for him, what he would have been too modestor too proud! - to say for himself, that he told that story as no other man could have told it, and that he served his generation best by living as the dying Henry Thoreau said quietly — in 'one world at a time.'

BLISS PERRY

ALEXANDER AGASSIZ

1835-1910

THE story of the little boy who, sleeping under haystacks and living on black bread and cheese, trudged from Freiburg to Neuchâtel to visit his Swiss relations and became the eminent man of science and the highly successful man of affairs, would read like a fairy tale, were it not shadowed by a very human cloud of ill-health and sorrow. It is impossible in a few pages even to touch on all of Alexander Agassiz's varied activities, or more than to hint at the tenderness and depth of feeling that underlay a reserved and retiring personality which did not conceal his integrity, ability, and charm.

The fact that he and his father belonged to distinctly different types, can be clearly traced to the inheritance of the son. Louis Agassiz, the descendant of a long line of Protestant ministers, sprang full-fledged from the brain of Jove. From his father Alexander derived his love of science, his great energy and vast capacity for work. But his mother Cécile, sister of Alex Braun, the German botanist, was shy, sensitive, reserved, and artistic; from her he inherited his temperament and outlook on life. Nor was his executive ability in practical affairs, a quality conspicuously absent in the make-up of the father, by any means lacking in the son's descent. His uncle, Auguste Agassiz, founded a successful and extensive watch factory, while one of his mother's brothers, Max, was a well-known mining engineer.

Louis Agassiz, robust, enthusiastic, and optimistic, was constantly getting into financial straits along the path of everyday life; Alexander, sensitive and foreboding, had a singularly clear eye for the shoals ahead, and mapped his course, far in advance, to steer well to windward of them. The elder Agassiz, unrivalled as a teacher, had a voice that kindled enthusiasm as readily in the market-place as in the halls of learning. He was a born intellectual leader, and rejoiced in spreading the gospel of science. His son, reserved and indifferent to popular acclaim, though he prized the

recognition of his scientific peers, led his intellectual life in the retirement of a research investigator. It is needless to state which man won the greater popular recognition; but in the opinion of those best qualified to judge, Alexander made more lasting contributions to pure science than his father.

Alexander Agassiz was born in 1835, in a small apartment in Neuchâtel, a bit of French Switzerland then under Prussian rule. There his father was professor of natural history; and there the boy passed his first years. He appears to have been a serious and thoughtful little chap, with the bewitching smile that he retained through life.

Louis Agassiz's meagre salary was quite insufficient to support his family, publish his scientific work, and maintain the staff of assistants that he managed to somehow keep about him. After he had exhausted the resources of his community, he started, in 1846, on a scientific exploration of the United States, under an appointment from the King of Prussia, suggested by Humboldt. On his departure Mrs. Agassiz settled in Freiburg, with her boy and two girls, to be near her brother. It was a pathetic little household of slender means: Mrs. Agassiz was an invalid, Alex did the marketing, kept the tiny accounts, and looked after the family. Although still a mere child, he responded to the influence of two such inspiring teachers as his Uncle Alex Braun and von Siebold, from whom he got his first training in science.

When he was thirteen his mother died, and his father, then installed as Professor at Harvard, sent word that his son should join him in America. A curious Bohemian establishment received the little foreigner; for Louis Agassiz had gathered about him a miscellaneous assortment of zoölogical live stock, crowded in with assistants and hangers-on, one of whom was supposed to do the housekeeping. In 1850 the elder Agassiz brought home his second wife, Elizabeth Cary. She won order out of chaos, sent for the two daughters in Europe, took the motherless children to her heart, and made for them a happy home in the New World. The close and enduring friendship of Alexander and his step-mother lasted nearly through the span of his own life.

He graduated from Harvard in 1855. That he was barely in the