The Student, the Fish and Agassiz
By the student, Nathanael Southgate Shaler (1841-1906), professor of paleontology and geology at Harvard, 1869-1906. Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) was a professor of natural history at Harvard, 1848-1873. Shaler relates his experience as a student under Agassiz around 1860:
When I sat me down before my tin pan, Agassiz brought me a small fish, placing it before me with the rather stern requirement that I should study
it, but should on no account talk to any one concerning it, nor read anything relating to fishes, until I had his permission so to do. To my inquiry "What shall I do?" he said in effect: "Find out what you can without damaging the specimen; when I think that you have done the work I will question you."
In the course of an hour I thought I had compassed that fish; it was a rather unsavory object, giving forth the stench of old alcohol, then loathsome to me, though in time I came to like it. Many of the scales were loosened so that they fell off. It appeared to me to be a case for a summary report, which I was anxious to make and get on to the next stage of the business. But Agassiz, though always within call, concerned himself no further with me that day, nor the next, nor for a week.
At first, this neglect was distressing; but. . . I set my wits to work upon the thing, and in the course of a hundred hours or so thought I had done much--a hundred times as much as seemed possible at the start. I got interested in finding out how the scales went in series, their shape, the form and placement of the teeth, etc. Finally, I felt full of the subject and probably expressed it in my bearing; [but] as for words about it then, there were none from my master except his cheery "Good morning."
At length on the seventh day, came the question "Well?" and my disgorge of learning to him as he sat on the edge of my table puffing his cigar. At the end of the hour's telling, he swung off and away, saying, "That is not right." .... I went at the task anew, discarded my first notes, and in another week of ten hours a day labor I had results which astonished myself and satisfied him.