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growth to-day, and he often said, in his lectures, ‘the history of the individual is the history of the type.’
But the coincidence between the geological succession, the embryonic development, the zoological gradation, and the geographical distribution of animals in the past and the present, rested, according to his belief, upon an intellectual coherence and not upon a material connection.
So, also, the variability, as well as the constancy, of organized beings, at once so plastic and so inflexible, seemed to him controlled by something more than the mechanism of selfadjust-ing forces.
In this conviction he remained unshaken all his life, although the development theory came up for discussion under so many various aspects during that time.
His views are now in the descending scale; but to give them less than their real prominence here would be to deprive his scientific career of its true basis.
Belief in a Creator was the keynote of his study of nature.
In summing up the comprehensive results of Agassiz's paleontological researches, and especially of his ‘Fossil Fishes,’ Arnold Guyot says:1—
‘Whatever be the opinions which many ’
1 See Biographical Memoir of Louis Agassiz, p. 28.
Houghton, Mifflin and company, New York, Boston, 1885.
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