Select such subjects that your pupils cannot walk out without seeing them. Train your pupils to be observers, and have them provided with the specimens about which you speak. If you can find nothing better, take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen and examine it as you talk.
Louis AgassizWhen chemists have brought their knowledge out of their special laboratories into the laboratory of the world, where chemical combinations are and have been through all time going on in such vast proportions,-when physicists study the laws of moisture, of clouds and storms, in past periods as well as in the present,-when, in short, geologists and zoologists are chemists and physicists, and vice versa,-then we shall learn more of the changes the world has undergone than is possible now that they are separately studied.
Louis AgassizI will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God-a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge-adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.
Louis AgassizFacts are the words of God, and we may heap them together endlessly, but they will teach us little or nothing till we place them in their true relations, and recognize the thought that binds them together.
Louis AgassizThe time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world.
Louis AgassizEmbryology furnishes, also, the best measure of true affinities existing between animals.
Louis AgassizYou cannot do without one specialty. You must have some base-line to measure the work and attainments of others. For a general view of the subject, study the history of the sciences. Broad knowledge of all Nature has been the possession of no naturalist except Humboldt, and general relations constituted his specialty.
Louis Agassiz