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it was always pleasant to watch the effect of his drawings on the audience.
When showing, for instance, the correspondence of the articulate type, as a whole, with the metamorphoses of the higher insects, he would lead his listeners along the successive phases of insect development, talking as he drew and drawing as he talked, till suddenly the winged creature stood declared upon the blackboard, almost as if it had burst then and there from the chrysalis, and the growing interest of his hearers culminated in a burst of delighted applause.
After the first lecture in Boston there was no doubt of his success.
He carried his audience captive.
His treatment of the animal kingdom on the broad basis of the comparative method, in which the great types were shown in their relation to each other and to the physical history of the world, was new to his hearers.
Agassiz had also the rare gift of divesting his subject of technicalities and superfluous details.
His special facts never obscured the comprehensive outline, which they were intended to fill in and illustrate.
This simplicity of form and language was especially adapted to the audience he had now to address, little instructed in the facts or the
Houghton, Mifflin and company, New York, Boston, 1885.
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