Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence

This is a biographical book. JEAN LOUIS RODOLPHE AGASSIZ was born May 28, 1807, at the village of Motier, on the Lake of Morat. His father, Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, was a clergyman; his mother, Rose Mayor, was the daughter of a physician whose home was at Cudrefin, on the shore of the Lake of Neuchatel. The parsonages in Switzerland are frequently pretty and picturesque. That of Motier, looking upon the lake and sheltered by a hill which commands a view over the whole 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.