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

[513] absence. But it soon became evident that his health was seriously shaken, and that he needed the tonic of the northern winter. He was, indeed, never afterward as strong as he had been before this illness.

The winter of 1854 was passed in Cambridge with such quiet and rest as the conditions of his life would allow. In May of that year he received an invitation to the recently established University of Zurich, in Switzerland. His acceptance was urged upon the ground of patriotism as well as on that of a liberal endowment both for the professor, and for the museum of which he was to have charge. The offer was tempting, but Agassiz was in love (the word is not too strong) with the work he had undertaken and the hopes he had formed in America. He believed that by his own efforts, combined with the enthusiasm for science which he had aroused and constantly strove to keep alive and foster in the community, he should at last succeed in founding a museum after his own heart in the United States,—a museum which should not be a mere accumulation, however vast or extensive, of objects of natural history, but should have a well-combined and clearly expressed educational value. As we