Explore "The Spring of the Year" by Dallas Lore Sharp on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the four volumes of Agassiz's "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. " I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster, had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are a monumental work, the fruit of vast and heroic labors, with colored plates on stone, showing the turtles of the United States, and their life-history. The work was published more than half a century ago, but it looked old beyond its years -- massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug from the rocks; and I soon turned with a sigh from the weary learning of its plates and diagrams to look at the preface.
Then, reading down through the catalogue of human names and of thanks for help received, I came to a sentence beginning: --