This text is part of:
[265]
the cordial relation which existed between Von Buch and his young opponent.
Indeed, Agassiz's reverence and admiration for Von Buch was then, and continued throughout his life, deep and loyal.
Not alone from the men who had made these subjects their special study, did Agassiz meet with discouragements.
The letters of his beloved mentor, Humboldt, in 1837, show how much he regretted that any part of his young friend's energy should be diverted from zoology, to a field of investigation which he then believed to be one of theory rather than of precise demonstration.
He was, perhaps, partly influenced by the fact that he saw through the prejudiced eyes of his friend Von Buch.
‘Over your and Charpentier's moraines,’ he says, in one of his letters, ‘Leopold von Buch rages, as you may already know, considering the subject, as he does, his exclusive property.
But I too, though by no means so bitterly opposed to new views, and ready to believe that the boulders have not all been moved by the same means, am yet inclined to think the moraines due to more local causes.’
The next letter shows that Humboldt was seriously anxious lest this new field of activity,
Houghton, Mifflin and company, New York, Boston, 1885.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
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.