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

[241] procession of living beings, as he was wont to do, in their gradual introduction upon the earth. Indeed, his whole future work in ichthyology, and one might almost say in general zoology, was here sketched.

The technicalities of this work, at once so comprehensive in its combinations and so minute in its details, could interest only the professional reader, but its generalizations may well have a certain attraction for every thoughtful mind. It treats of the relations, anatomical, zoological, and geological, between the whole class of fishes, fossil and living, illustrated by numerous plates, while additional light is thrown on the whole by the revelations of embryology.

‘Notwithstanding these striking differences,’ says the author in the opening of the fifth chapter on the relations of fishes in general, ‘it is none the less evident to the attentive observer that one single idea has presided over the development of the whole class, and that all the deviations lead back to a primary plan, so that even if the thread seem broken in the present creation, one can reunite it on reaching the domain of fossil ichthyology.’¹

Having shown how the present creation has