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chain of the Bernese Alps, was especially so. It possessed a vineyard large enough to add something in good years to the small salary of the pastor; an orchard containing, among other trees, an apricot famed the country around for the unblemished beauty of its abundant fruit; a good vegetable garden, and a delicious spring of water flowing always fresh and pure into a great stone basin behind the house.
That stone basin was Agassiz's first aquarium; there he had his first collection of fishes.1
It does not appear that he had any precocious predilection for study, and his parents, who for the first ten years of his life were his only teachers, were too wise to stimulate his mind beyond the ordinary attainments of his age. Having lost her first four children in infancy, his mother watched with trembling solicitude over his early years.
It was perhaps for this reason that she was drawn so closely to her boy, and understood that his love of nature, and especially of all living
1 After his death a touching tribute was paid to his memory by the inhabitants of his birthplace. With appropriate ceremonies, a marble slab was placed above the door of the parsonage of Motier, with this inscription, ‘J. Louis Agassiz, celebre naturaliste, est ne dans cette maison, le 28 Mai, 1807.’
Houghton, Mifflin and company, New York, Boston, 1885.
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