1 1873.] DEATH. 215 while they kept watch over him from the open door, relieving one another from time to time. It was Pourtalès who, at the last moment, was surprised to see him rise in his bed, and to hear him exclaim, with great distinctness, "Le jeu est fini!"1 Then he fell back, and died, shortly after ten o'clock P.M., the 14th of December, 1873. Life for him had been a long and successful play, well filled from beginning to end. A post-mortem examination was made by Drs. BrownSéquard, Jeffries and Morrill Wyman, assisted by five other physicians. The brain was found to be very large and heavy, like that of George Cuvier, and traces of disease were recorded for a period dating back at least twelve years. The funeral took place on the 18th, at 2 P.M., in Appleton Chapel, in the College ground, Harvard Square. Rev. Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, professor in the College, conducted the service, according to the King's Chapel liturgy, of Boston. It was simple, all ceremonies except the strictly religious rites being dispensed with. The church was crowded with the most noted assembly ever seen in New England, including the Vice-President of the United States, the Governor, Ex-Governor, admirals, major-generals, poets, naturalists, savants, and distinguished ladies, together with the little band of Europeans who came with Agassiz to the New World, and all the members of the faculty of the University, with the students in a body. It was a winter afternoon, without snow, and not a 1 This recalls the exclamation of Rabelais at the moment of his death, "La farce est jouée." cold day. When the benediction was pronounced, the body was removed, the organ playing the "Dead March in Saul." A long procession followed to Mount Auburn, where the remains were buried in one of the most beautiful parts of the cemetery, very near the grave of Agassiz's friend, Felton. The monument erected over his grave is symbolic of one of his most remarkable discoveries. It is simply an Alpine boulder, weighing twenty-five hundred pounds, from the moraine of the glacier of the Aar. This granite block was selected by his cousin, M. Auguste Mayor, of Neuchâtel, from the lateral moraine, not far from the spot where the celebrated "Hôtel des Neuchâtelois" once stood. It was carried with great difficulty, "à force de bras," from the glacier to the Bernese Oberland village of Imhof, a distance of twenty-five miles, thence on a wagon to the railroad station of Thun. Around this superb boulder on which are engraved on one side the words, "Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz," and on the other, "Born at Motier, Switzerland, May 26, 1807; died at Cambridge, Mass., December 14, 1873" — there are several pine trees which formerly grew near the celebrated boulder called "Pierre-à-Bot," above the city of Neuchâtel, and which were successfully transplanted, and now shelter the Agassiz lot. |