Agassiz, when I saw him last, had read but a part of Origin of Species. He says it is POOR-VERY POOR!!. The fact is, he is very much annoyed by it.

Faith in order, which is the basis of science, cannot reasonably be separated from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion.

We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.

Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.

This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.