previous next
[266] with its fascinating speculations, should draw Agassiz away from his ichthyological researches.

Humboldt to Agassiz.

Berlin, December 2, 1837.
I have this moment received, my dear friend, by the hand of M. de Werther, the cabinet minister, your eighth and ninth numbers, with a fine pamphlet of text. I hasten to express my warm thanks, and I congratulate the public on your somewhat tardy resolution to give a larger proportion of text. One should flatter neither the king, nor the people, nor one's dearest friend. I maintain, therefore, that no one has told you forcibly enough how the very persons who justly admire your work, constantly complain of this fragmentary style of publication, which is the despair of those who have not the leisure to place your scattered sheets where they belong and disentangle the skein.1

I think you would do well to publish for a while more text than plates. You could do


1 Owing to the irregularity with which he received and was forced to work up his material, Agassiz was often either in advance or in arrears with certain parts of his subject, so that his plates and his text did not keep pace with each other, thus causing his readers much annoyance.

Houghton, Mifflin and company, New York, Boston, 1885.

Tufts University provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
M. Agassiz (3)
M. Werther (1)
William Von Humboldt (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
December 2nd, 1837 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: