Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

From this glimpse into ‘The Little Academy’ we return to the thread of the home letters, learning from the next one that Agassiz's private collections were assuming rather formidable proportions when considered as part of the household furniture. Brought together in various ways, partly by himself, partly in exchange for duplicates, partly as pay for arranging specimens in the Munich Museum, they had already acquired, when compared with his small means, a considerable pecuniary value, and a far higher scientific importance. They included fishes, some rare mammalia, reptiles, shells, birds, an herbarium of some three thousand species of plants collected by himself, and a small cabinet of minerals. After enumerating them in a letter to his parents he continues: ‘You can imagine that all these things are in my way now that I cannot attend to them, and that for want of room and care they are piled up and in danger of spoiling. You see by my list that the whole collection is valued at two hundred louis; and this is so low an estimate that even those who sell objects of natural history ’