CHAPTER TWO
THROUGHT HIS extraordinary career Louis Agassiz was a man of large plans and boundless energy, a spirit emboldened by noble undertakings. He was a pioneer, a worker. And these, it ought to be said at the start, were not the least of the reasons why he loomed so large in the estimate of our forebears and why so much that was painful—the charge of demagoguery, the bitterness over Darwin—would be forgotten in time, or at least left unsaid.
At the age of twenty-one, writing from Munich, where he was studying to become a medical doctor, he had declared to his father, a provincial Swiss pastor: “I wish it may be said of Louis Agassiz that he was the first naturalist of his time, a good citizen, and a good son, beloved of those who knew him. I feel in myself the strength of a whole generation.” The letter was dated February 14, 1829, and that same year, still at the University of Munich, he had undertaken his first important work, a study of Brazilian fish, largely because, as he said, it was so immense a task. In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.
Cuvier, like others to come, warned against overwork. Alexander von Humboldt, who too had perceived amazing resources in the young man, cautioned against spreading oneself too thin. Having attained, with Humboldt’s help, a professorship of natural history at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Agassiz suddenly had turned his attention to Alpine glaciers.
It was Agassiz, at age thirty-three, who first presented to the world the awesome vision of an ancient age of ice. Others had noted the movement of existing glaciers and the consequent disturbances to the landscape, but Agassiz pictured a time past when all of northern Europe lay buried beneath “a colossal ice field,” and thus, he contended, numerous geologic mysteries had at last been solved. His immediate plan was for extended, orderly glacial research, something entirely new.
Everything that he undertook had to be done on a grand, heroic scale. His glacial studies included a harrowing solo descent by rope 120 feet into one of the crystal blue “wells” of the glacier of Aar and a successful ascent of the Jungfrau. His publishing projects—the pioneering, two-volume Etudes sur les Glaciers, for example, which appeared in 1840—involved the combined efforts of a dozen or more artists, lithographers, and fellow naturalists, whom he took it upon himself to feed, house, finance, and inspirit with his own particular methods of field study. When debts mounted at his headquarters-home-laboratory at Neuchâtel, when his marriage became a shambles, the solution was an overseas expedition. He would go to the United States, enlarge his horizons, meet everyone who mattered, add to his glacial studies, resolve the financial crises with a series of public lectures—all on his own and all in no more than a few months.
And thus it was in 1846 that he embarked on the very different new life which, ironically, had never been part of his plans. He was almost forty. His major contributions to science, as such things usually are judged, were also behind him. Prolific as he was to remain, nothing published afterward would come up to the earlier works; there was to be no further daring leap of the imagination to compare with his glacial vision.
Yet, as a colleague was to write years later, “A great adventure it turned out to be, lasting until death, and one that put America permanently in his debt.”
What he became in the New World was the great proselytizer of the natural sciences, a hero, possibly the most invigorating and influential voice ever heard in American education. He would be called “nature’s flaming apostle,” the man who first made science a national cause. His popularity was unprecedented, instantaneous, and it swept him off his feet. It would be thirteen years before he returned to Europe, and then only for a brief visit.
For weeks at sea, struggling to learn English, he memorized whole sentences that he repeated to anyone on board who would listen.
He reached Boston in October and spent the first three or four weeks traveling up and down the East Coast, as far south as Washington. He saw Benjamin Silliman at Yale (the “patriarch of science in America,” as he noted); James Dwight Dana, also of Yale, who was Silliman’s son-in-law and the most promising young naturalist in the country; Joseph Henry, professor of physical sciences at Princeton, who would shortly be named the first head of the new Smithsonian Institution; Dr. Samuel George Morton of Philadelphia, a physician and naturalist; Frederick Ernst Melsheimer, the entomologist, who wrote privately that Agassiz, “this big geologico-everythingo-French-Swiss gun,” was really quite a likable fellow.
In New York he conferred with William C. Redfield, the meteorologist; at Albany, with the noted geologist and paleontologist James Hall; while much of the journey he was accompanied by Asa Gray of Harvard, a botanist of “indefatigable zeal.”
But then none whom he had met was deficient in either zeal or knowledge, he wrote to his mother. “In both they seem to compete with us, and in ardor and activity they even surpass most of our savants.” At Philadelphia, Dr. Morton had assembled no less than six hundred human skulls, of Indians mostly, a collection, Agassiz declared, that alone was worth the trip to America.
What a people, he exclaimed elsewhere in the letter. “What a country is this!” The train from Boston had carried him “with the swiftness of lightning” through dazzling autumn scenery. Ancient moraines and transported boulders, all the telltale tracks of the glaciers, were everywhere to be seen, “literally covering the country.” On Long Island Sound, between New Haven and New York, the flocks of ducks and gulls rising in advance of his steamer were greater than any he had ever beheld. He had traveled the “magnificent” Hudson River, which yielded fish by the barrel for his studies.
The first public appearance, his American debut, was made back in Boston in December of 1846. Through the British geologist Charles Lyell, Agassiz’s most important convert to the glacial theory, a series of lectures had been arranged with the Lowell Institute, a liberally endowed program of “free lectures of the highest type.” As Lowell Institute speakers, Silliman, Lyell, and Gray already had distinguished themselves before large public gatherings and earned fees three times what was customary elsewhere.
He spoke “without notes and from a full brain,” as Asa Gray remarked, and he was a sensation. Silliman, until then the unchallenged popularizer of science, came on from New Haven just to hear him. Upward of three thousand people turned out, night after night, even in the most difficult weather, and sat spellbound in the huge hall. He was such a triumph that each lecture had to be given again for a second audience. “Never was Agassiz’s power as a teacher, or the charm of his personal presence more evident,” his American wife was to write.
His subject, the theme he was to expound upon again and again in times to come, was “the great plan of creation,” life on Earth from the smallest radiated animal to the ultimate vertebrate, man. He stood alone on the platform, a piece of chalk in hand, a small blackboard his only prop, talking rapidly and often drawing on the board as he talked. His English still was inadequate, but the long pauses, as he searched for the right word, seemed to add appreciably to the effect he had on the audience. The pauses, we are told, “enlisted their sympathy,” as meantime the chalk went swiftly on, producing drawings “so graphic that the spoken word was hardly missed.” He would lead his listeners through the successive phases of insect development, for example, until, with a few sudden strokes, a superb “winged creature stood forth on the blackboard, almost as if it had burst then and there from the chrysalis.” The audience would break into applause, then moan aloud as he wiped the board clean, to proceed to the next subject.
More appearances followed, in Boston and other cities. He charmed everybody, layman and scientist alike. In six months he had earned nearly $6,000 (about $60,000 in today’s money). The timing of his entrance into the mainstream of American life had been perfect. The country was in the throes of an educational awakening. It was the heyday of the lyceum, the nationwide movement to increase “the general diffusion” of learning with public lectures. In Massachusetts alone there were well over a hundred local lyceums. of which the Lowell Institute was the largest and best known. Libraries were being established in one community after another, even in factories. The first normal schools, schools for training teachers, had been founded in an effort to raise standards in education.
Popular interest in science, moreover, and especially the study of nature, was sharply on the rise, as more and more new theories and discoveries appeared to challenge Biblical versions of creation.
It was from the people of America that he drew his greatest inspiration, Agassiz said. He sensed something new beginning on this distant continent. “Naturalist that I am,” he explained in the letter to his mother, “I cannot but put the people first.” Their look, like his own, was “wholly toward the future.”
His change in plans, the decision to stay, came one year after his arrival, in September 1847, when he was offered the chair of natural history at the Lawrence Scientific School, an institution newly established at Harvard partly for the purpose of keeping him in the United States.
Harvard at this point numbered less than four hundred students. Harvard professors “drudged along in a dreary humdrum sort of way” (we read in the recollections of Charles Francis Adams II) and taught virtually everything by rote. Students had no say in the subjects they studied. The classics held the supreme place of honor; science was something to be memorized in fourteen weeks. No one was expected to enjoy any of it.
Agassiz, by dramatic contrast, was a man of insuperable good cheer and apparently boundless energy. He was open, opinionated. He was never dull. “Harvard,” he said, “is a respectable high school where they teach the dregs of education.”
In appearance, he was still very much in his prime, a physically powerful-looking, handsome man, about five feet ten inches tall, with heavy shoulders, large expressive hands, and a “superb” head that summoned euphoric postulations from the phrenologists. Longfellow, after meeting him at a dinner party, wrote of “the bright, beaming face” and later observed, “Agassiz seems to be a great favorite with the ladies.”
“His eyes were the feature of his face,” one such lady would recall. “They were of a beautiful bright brown, full of tenderness, of meaning…I think there was never but one pair of eyes such as Professor Louis Agassiz’s!”
Emerson, seeing the new professor on a train, was surprised by how much he resembled a successful politician.
Agassiz strolled through Harvard Yard enjoying a cigar when to smoke in the Yard was considered a grave offense. He refused to limit his wardrobe to the traditional professorial black. He prepared no syllabus. He required no entrance examinations. His students were accepted purely on whether he liked them, which meant that he took just about everyone who applied, including a large number who never could have qualified according to the standard Harvard requirements. Nor, unlike his contemporaries, did he see any reason for excluding young women. He “came into this puritan society like a warm glow in a chilly room,” Charles W. Eliot, Harvard’s famous president, would remember fondly. “He was a revolutionary spirit…an exception to all our rules.”
Most unorthodox of all, and crucial as time would tell, was his manner of teaching. He intended, he said, to teach students to see—to observe and compare—and he intended to put the burden of study on them. Probably he never said what he is best known for, “Study nature, not books,” or not in those exact words. But such certainly was the essence of his creed, and for his students the idea was firmly implanted by what they would afterward refer to as “the incident of the fish.”
His initial interview at an end, Agassiz would ask the student when he would like to begin. If the answer was now, the student was immediately presented with a dead fish—usually a very long dead, pickled, evil-smelling specimen—personally selected by “the master” from one of the wide-mouthed jars that lined his shelves. The fish was placed before the student in a tin pan. He was to look at the fish, the student was told, whereupon Agassiz would leave, not to return until later in the day, if at all.
Samuel Scudder, one of the many from the school who would go on to do important work of their own (his in entomology), described the experience as one of life’s turning points.
In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish…. Half an hour passed—an hour—another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked it in the face—ghastly; from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view—just as ghastly. I was in despair.
I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish, and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature.
When Agassiz returned later and listened to Scudder recount what he had observed, his only comment was that the young man must look again.
I was piqued; I was mortified. Still more of that wretched fish! But now I set myself to my task with a will, and discovered one new thing after another….The afternoon passed quickly; and when, toward its close, the professor inquired: “Do you see it yet?”
“No,” I replied, “I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before.”
The day following, having thought of the fish through most of the night, Scudder had a brainstorm. The fish, he announced to Agassiz, had symmetrical sides with paired organs.
“Of course, of course!” Agassiz said, obviously pleased. Scudder asked what he might do next, and Agassiz replied, “Oh, look at your fish!”
In Scudder’s case the lesson lasted a full three days. “Look, look, look,” was the repeated injunction and the best lesson he ever had, Scudder recalled, “a legacy the professor has left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part.”
The incident of the fish marked the end of the student’s novitiate. At once Agassiz became more communicative, his manner that of a friend or colleague, now that the real work could begin.
The way to all learning, “the backbone of education,” was to know something well. “A smattering of everything is worth little,” he would insist in the heavy French accent that he was never to lose. “Facts are stupid things, until brought into conjunction with some general law.” It was a great and common fallacy to suppose that an encyclopedic mind is desirable. The mind was made strong not through much learning but by “the thorough possession of something.” In other words, “Look at your fish.”
Most important, one must become capable of hard, continuous, original work without the support of the teacher. A year or two of natural history, studied as he understood it, would be the best kind of training for any serious career.
What the student needed above all was the chance to learn to think for himself. So he ought to pursue the line of investigation that interested him most, just as, conversely, a professor ought to be perfectly free to devote his own efforts however he chose. One term, a course of twenty-one lectures was offered on sharks alone, a favorite topic of the professor’s, which, as one student remembered, “inspired him to unusual energy and eloquence.”
The customary procedure, however, was to spend the first term in zoology (problems of classification, the basics of comparative anatomy), the second on geology (with roughly a third of the time devoted to the glacial age). The material varied little year to year, Agassiz as always “leaning over the lecture desk and hurling whole paragraphs of his lectures with great vigor full in the faces of his students in the front row.” And no matter how many years they stayed with him, he remained “the master.” To have doubted or criticized anything he said would have been, as one of them said, equivalent to heresy or high treason.
The magic of his personality appears to have mattered above and beyond everything. “His individuality was a subject of continual observation by all.…Agassiz himself was more interesting than his works,” reads one recollection. A contagious enthusiasm surrounded him like an atmosphere, reads another. The “personal quality of Agassiz was the greatest of his powers,” the geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler wrote in later life, after he too had become a Harvard luminary.
By far the greater part of the instruction I had from my master was in divers bits of talk concerning certain species and the arrangement of the specimens. He would often work with me for hours unrolling fossils, all the while keeping up a running commentary which would range this way and that, of men, of places, of Aristotle, of Oken. [Lorenz Oken, German naturalist and mystical philosopher, had been one of Agassiz’s professors at Munich.] He was a perfect narrator, and on any peg of fact would quickly hang a fascinating discourse. Often when he was at work on wet specimens while I was dealing with fossils, he would come to me with, say, a fish in each hand, that I might search in his pockets for a cigar, cut the tip, put it between his teeth, and light it for him. That would remind him of something, and he would puff and talk until the cigar was burned out, and he would have to be provided with another.
Merely to lecture and inspire was not enough, Agassiz preached fiercely: It was a professorial duty to investigate, discover—to collect. So there were summer sojourns in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, fishing expeditions off Nantucket. At government expense he went to Florida to examine coral reefs.
He led his first wilderness expedition, across Lake Superior by canoe, the summer of 1848. The party included students, naturalists, two doctors, and an artist. At evening, camped on Superior’s northern shore, they would gather to hear him elucidate on the day’s findings and observations. A portable blackboard (a piece of canvas painted black) would be unrolled and pinned to the side of his tent, and the lecture would begin, mosquitoes and black flies notwithstanding. Come morning, he would take his place in the lead canoe, which had a big frying pan lashed to the prow as a figurehead. Then once under way, the Indian guides would strike up a song, singing in French the same two or three songs over and over and with a terrible, incongruous sadness that greatly amused Agassiz. What they were singing, he explained to his companions, were in fact the lewd chansons of the ancien regime, which doubtless their ancestors had heard sung by young officers in remembrance of distant Paris.
Glacial phenomena of the kind he had encountered in New England were even more pronounced here on the Great Lakes. He saw at once the singular geographic scale of the North American ice sheet, and the expedition returned with a store of geologic samples, as well as eight enormous casks of fish.
The existing collections at Harvard when he first began teaching there were pitiful, a few minerals which never had been arranged properly, the barest beginnings of a botanical garden. Now the rock samples, fossils, the fish and plants and insect specimens began gathering everywhere and anywhere he could find storage space. An old bathhouse on the Charles River was converted into a temporary museum, his students indoctrinated with the omnivorous spirit that had propelled him since boyhood. In his own student days at Munich he had hauled a pine tree into his living quarters and kept as many as forty birds flying about.
Once, when a stable burned a mile from the Harvard campus, killing a number of prize racehorses, the professor himself rushed to the scene, took charge of tending to the surviving animals, consoled their owners, then “skillfully came to the point of his business,” which was to ask for the skeletons of all the dead horses. The incident, it would be explained, was illustrative of both his zeal and his ability to charm support from anyone, anytime, under any circumstances; he got the skeletons.
Smaller specimens, including live snakes, frequently were transported to and from class in his coat pockets, and the fenced yard behind the house he had rented contained, among other things, a live eagle, an alligator, a family of possums, and a tame bear known all over town. (One surviving story of the Agassiz household is of the night the bear got drunk at a student faculty gathering.)
Just when Agassiz began planning seriously for a great, permanent working collection—a proper zoological museum befitting a great university—is not clear. But as his fame spread, people everywhere began shipping him things they had found—some nameless fish from the ocean depths, shells unearthed in a cornfield. The zeal with which some of his minions would serve in the cause become nearly as legendary as his own. To provide Agassiz with freshly laid turtle eggs—these essential to his research in embryology—one young man, the principal of a nearby academy, hid beside a pond for hours before dawn every morning for three weeks, awaiting his chance. Then, the bucket of precious eggs finally in hand, he flagged a passing freight train so as not to delay delivery, an explanation the engineer is said to have understood perfectly.
His peers found him an unfailing inspiration, a virtuoso without equal. A dissertation on the mathematical arrangement of leaves delivered before a small gathering in Cambridge was acclaimed by the botanist Asa Gray as “most excellent and spirited.” In Philadelphia, rising to address the first meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Agassiz spoke not of glaciers or sharks or embryology, as might have been expected, but on the phonetic apparatus of the cricket.
He was coauthor of a textbook, Principles of Zoology, his first American work, which went through sixteen editions during Agassiz’s lifetime. For a second series of Lowell Institute lectures a reporter was assigned to transcribe his every word, so the full text could be carried daily in one of the Boston papers.
In 1850 an account of the Lake Superior expedition was published with wide success. Beautifully illustrated, it was at once a fascinating narrative (one of the party had kept a daily journal), a major contribution to American geology, an invaluable guide to Lake Superior birds, fish, and, to the tremendous satisfaction of countless readers as well as reviewers, it was another emphatic declaration by the master naturalist that there need be no conflict between the revelation of science and Genesis. “Agassiz belongs to that class of naturalists who see God in everything,” wrote a reviewer in the Watchman and Christian Reflector. Agassiz had described the whole of creation as an expression of “divine thought.”
He held center stage through the 1850s; he had overshadowed them all—Silliman, Dana, Henry, Hall, Gray. The voice of Charles Darwin was still to be heard.
He was beloved by the transcendentalists, both for his own adoration of nature and for his “huge good fellowship,” as Emerson said. Emerson in his private journal listed him number two among “my men,” second only to Thomas Carlyle. Henry David Thoreau gathered up turtles and a black snake for him from the shores of Walden Pond. At the Parker House in Boston, when the celebrated Saturday Club dined—Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes—it was Agassiz who sat at the head of the table. Holmes’s description, in part, was as follows:
The great professor, strong, broad-shouldered, square
In life’s rich noontide, joyous, debonair
His social hour no leaden care alloys
His laugh rings loud and mirthful as a boy’s
That lusty laugh the puritans forgot
What ear hath heard it and remembers not?
His writings and lectures on the Ice Age lent a whole new aura to the New England landscape just at the time when the New England landscape was being “discovered” by poets and painters, and White Mountain hotels had become the rage. “Connoisseurs of landscape from Boston and Hartford, parties from Worcester and Burlington, drove on the tops of stages or in private buckboards through Franconia Notch, observing Mounts Webster and Lafayette as if they were two pictures in different styles by the same master,” the historian Van Wyck Brooks would write. “They studied the slopes and the cliffs…and longed for a little talk with Agassiz. For Agassiz had made these scenes exciting.”
Professionally and personally these were the best of years. The old entourage from Neuchâtel, the artists and other assistants, came to join him in his American adventure, to enlist in his latest projects. Following the death of his first wife in Switzerland, he remarried and sent for his three children. Socially, he and the new Mrs. Agassiz—the former Elizabeth Cabot Cary, daughter of a Boston banker—became bright stars in the Cambridge firmament. She was tactful and good-humored and fifteen years younger than he. For years she would handle his correspondence in English, edit his papers and publications, and take notes on all his lectures.
They built a big, square house on Quincy Street that was the setting for famous dinner parties. Summers were spent at fashionable Nahant. Money remained a problem—the large house had a large mortgage, for example—but Agassiz was quoted as saying he had no time to waste making money (which further endeared him among his admirers), and the private school for girls that his wife opened on the top floor of the house helped not only to make ends meet but to put the Agassiz stamp on still another side of community life. “I, myself, superintend the methods of instruction,” he wrote in the brochure for the school. “I shall endeavor to prevent the necessary discipline from falling into a lifeless routine, alike deadening to the spirit of teacher and pupil.”
So, in addition to everything else, he taught at the girls’ school for the next eight years.
The most ambitious publishing effort of his career was launched, a work of ten volumes encompassing the entire natural history of the United States. It was his “endeavor to make myself understood by all.” Ten thousand circulars were issued, and twenty-five hundred subscribers enrolled. Proofs of the first two quarto volumes, including his Essay on Classification, were received by Agassiz on May 27, 1857, the day before his fiftieth birthday.
The plan for the museum was announced—the Museum of Comparative Zoology, as he wished to have it called. A benefactor, with Agassiz’s guidance, had provided in his will that Harvard should receive $50,000 toward the project, but for zoological research only. If no suitable building were provided, then the bequest would be lost. Agassiz, in a manner never dreamed of before, campaigned for additional funds among members of the Massachusetts legislature. “I don’t know much about museums,” one of them is said to have remarked, “but I, for one, will not stand by and see so brave a man struggle without aid.” The legislature voted an appropriation of $100,000. A group of local businessmen raised over $70,000. Harvard provided the site, and in June 1859 the cornerstone was laid.
Acutely aware of his own prominence, acutely conscious of “how wide an influence I already exert upon this land of the future,” Agassiz wanted the museum to stand forever as a monument to his whole vision of a true university and of what an education in natural history ought to be about. He had been offered an exalted position at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, with a salary of 50,000 francs, but he had turned it down, explaining, “I prefer to build anew here.”
It was that same summer of 1859, with the cornerstone in place, that he returned to Europe, accompanied by his wife, and it was in England the autumn following, in November, that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared, a volume bound in green cloth and priced at fifteen shillings. The first copy to reach Cambridge, one sent by the author to Asa Gray, arrived just before Christmas. Agassiz also received a copy, with a note from Darwin asking that Agassiz at least give him the credit for having “earnestly endeavored to arrive at the truth.”
He was thunderstruck by the book, as all Cambridge learned soon enough. It was “poor, very poor,” he told Gray at first chance, before, in fact, he had read all of it. If Darwin was right, others were saying, then clearly Agassiz was wrong. “Now, John, stop and think of it for a moment,” one student, still a believer in Agassiz, wrote to a friend, “and don’t you perceive that if his [Darwin’s] theory were true it would leave one without a God?”
Gray, who had been impressed at once with the “great ability of the book,” became its most outspoken champion this side of the Atlantic. Yet Gray, as everybody appreciated, was the most pious of men, a steady attendant at church. Agassiz, who seldom went to church, denounced the book and its theory as atheism.
The lines were drawn. In no time he and Gray, friends for years, were barely speaking. Among his students Agassiz talked disparagingly of Gray’s ability; Gray exploded that Agassiz was a “sort of demagogue” who “always talks to the rabble.”
For Agassiz, as for Silliman and others, to study nature was to study the works of God. He had little use for formal religion because, as he once wrote to Dana, he had seen too much in his life of overbearing clerics and religious bigotry. But there could be no evolutionary process as depicted by Darwin for the simple reason that all species were special, distinct, fixed creations. Species—caterpillars, caribou, Lake Superior pike, or Darwin’s finches—were the immutable aspects of the divine plan, which from the start had a specific final purpose, mankind. “It can be shown that in the great plan of creation…the very commencement exhibits a certain tendency toward the end…. The constantly increasing similarity to man of the creatures successively called into existence makes the final purpose obvious.”
Progress there had been, the long record of life on Earth was indeed an upward path. The changes, however, had been achieved, he insisted, in great creative stages, these divided by momentous catastrophe. His doctrine, the cataclysmic theory of his own great master, Cuvier, was that all life on the planet had been destroyed repeatedly in order to start afresh with new forms. Evidence of such destruction was abundant in the fossil record, while all present inhabitants of the planet were the latest and final stage. It was as if God, like Louis Agassiz, wiped the board clean again and again to arrive at a grand intended finale, with man the crowning creation.
Several times in his book, to substantiate one point or another, Darwin had referred to observations by Agassiz (on embryological succession, for example). But Darwin’s conclusions were “the sum of wrong-headedness,” Agassiz told his students. Darwin’s theory, Agassiz instructed the members of the Boston Society of Natural History, was “ingenious but fanciful.” “The resources of the Deity,” he wrote, “cannot be so meager that in order to create a human being endowed with reason, He must change a monkey into a man.”
John Amory Lowell, guiding spirit of the Lowell Institute, lent Agassiz his support as the battle got under way. Harvard stood behind him. When the new museum was opened in November 1860, Harvard President Cornelius Felton declared it altogether appropriate that the building stood face-to-face with the theological school, “God’s word and God’s works mutually illustrating each other.”
Agassiz produced a stream of articles for Atlantic Monthly and carried the fight to the lecture circuit, his popularity soaring to new heights. The articles, published as a book, Methods of Study in Natural History, went through nineteen editions. To know that Agassiz of Harvard decried the theories of Charles Darwin, that he, of all learned men, marched foremost in the assault on the new godless vision of life, brought solace to a degree later generations would never be able to comprehend. He was quite literally adored. He was “the prince of naturalists.”
Still, a certain uneasiness spread among his students. Colleagues had begun to question his powers of reason. Admirers were saddened to see him stumble over facts, contradict himself, or stubbornly refuse to give the other side a fair hearing. Gray, with whom he had broken completely, became convinced that the illustrious Agassiz mind was in a state of rapid deterioration. “This man,” wrote Gray, “who might have been so useful to science and promised so much here has been for years a delusion, a snare, and a humbug, and is doing us far more harm than he can ever do us good.”
To give credence and grandeur to catastrophe’s role in creation, Agassiz returned again to his glacial visions, writing now with perhaps greater power than ever before, as can be seen in these lines from still another series in the Atlantic Monthly:
The long summer was over. For ages a tropical climate had prevailed over a great part of the Earth, and animals whose home is now beneath the equator roamed over the world from the Far South to the very borders of the Arctic. The gigantic quadrupeds, the mastodons, elephants, tigers, lions, hyenas, bears, whose remains are found in Europe from its southern promontories to the northern limits of Siberia and Scandinavia, and in America from the southern states to Greenland and the Melville Island, may indeed be said to have possessed the Earth in those days. But their reign was over. A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe; it spread over the very countries where these tropical animals had their homes, and so suddenly did it come upon them that they were embalmed beneath masses of snow and ice, without time even for the decay which follows death…If the glacial theory be true, a great mass of ice, of which the present glaciers are but the remnants, formerly spread over the whole Northern Hemisphere.
In an odd, paradoxical way he became obsessed with an apocalyptic world of ice, the entire globe frozen in death—he who had given himself so wholeheartedly to the study of life, he who was such an exuberant life force. It remained only to find the familiar traces in the Southern Hemisphere as well.
So while Darwin, gray, stooped, two years younger than Agassiz, kept to his country place in England, puttering about in a little greenhouse, Agassiz announced plans for a trip to Brazil. Another benefactor had supplied the wherewithal; the trip in theory was to provide the professor with a long-needed rest.
He sailed on April 1, 1865, at the head of a large, widely publicized expedition and returned the following year with some eighty thousand specimens and a triumphant announcement: the valley of the Amazon itself with all its fecund tropical splendors once had been obliterated beneath rivers of ice. He had found the proof.
His proof, however, turned out to be exceedingly thin and open to question. His peers were skeptical, or worse. In truth it was the end of his own “long summer.” A shadow fell over the brilliant career, for all the popular acclaim, for all the devotion he inspired. He grew increasingly dictatorial with students and with his museum assistants, unpleasantly intolerant of any divergence from his own views. He “not infrequently lost his temper.” And numbers of his brightest students revolted, or quit in despair.
A breakdown from nervous strain and overwork in 1869 left him incapacitated for nearly a year. Yet the headlong life resumed. The museum building was doubled in size. He embarked on still another venture, around Cape Horn to California with a Coast Survey expedition, and returned this time with some one hundred thousand specimens. And in the final year of his life he founded still another school of his own, a summer school of science for teachers on Penikese Island in Buzzards Bay.
The epic work Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, of which only four volumes had been produced, was never completed. The last published work, an article for the Atlantic Monthly, was one titled, “Evolution and Permanence of Type.”
He died December 14, 1873. Eight days earlier he had returned from the museum feeling tired and had lain down on the couch to rest awhile. He never spoke again.
Obituaries were carried in every paper. Learned societies held special meetings to pass memorial resolutions. No death since that of Lincoln, wrote the editors of Harper’s Weekly, had elicited such heartfelt expressions of sorrow.
The legacy was truly amazing. His work on fish, the initial research on glaciers, the impact of his writing on the Ice Age, the zest and glamour he brought to American culture at a critical moment, were all contributions of the first order. His beloved Museum of Comparative Zoology—the Agassiz Museum, or simply the Agassiz, as it came to be known in Cambridge—was without question one of the finest, most important such institutions in the world, which it remains to this day. (In the hall of North American birds, for example, is displayed every species to be found north of Mexico.)
Mistaken as he may have been about evolution, he was by no means alone. Nor do intellectual brilliance and a life in science necessarily mean that it is any easier to break from cherished convictions, not to mention the prevailing views of one’s own era. Humboldt had found it impossible to accept Agassiz’s theory of glaciers.
Agassiz, besides, had been caught up by a popular success no one in science had to cope with until then. In the eyes of his vast audience he was indeed “the first naturalist of his time, a good citizen…beloved of those who knew him,” all that he had aspired to so long before in the letter to his father. To have totally reexamined his work after 1859, to have retreated from his own strongly expressed positions on creation, to have abandoned his audience, would have been horrendously difficult. Even someone less inspirited by public acclaim, less dependent by nature on the authority and approval granted by such acclaim, might have found it impossible.
Agassiz, as numbers of students and associates observed, needed an audience. On the lecture platform or in the classroom he seemed to draw his energy, his “magic,” from the people before him. And this, in a sense, was both his greatest flaw and his greatest strength. It was what, as a scientist, made him something less than a Lyell or a Darwin, and it is what, as a teacher, made him incomparable.
His precepts on the teaching of natural history, certainly a significant part of the legacy, had far-reaching influence. “Never try to teach what you yourself do not know, and know well,” he lectured at Penikese his final summer. “Train your pupils to be observers….If you can find nothing better, take a housefly or a cricket, and let each hold a specimen and examine it as you talk…. He is lost, as an observer, who believes that he can, with impunity, affirm that for which he can adduce no evidence…. Have the courage to say I do not know…. The more I look at the great complex of the animal world, the more sure do I feel that we have not yet reached its hidden meaning.”
Like Humboldt before him, he took the greatest pride in the influence he had on the next generation of naturalists. And indeed the subsequent careers of his students and museum assistants are as strong a testament to his genius as almost anything else. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler became a popular professor of geology at Harvard (an inspiration to Theodore Roosevelt, among many others). Samuel Scudder became the country’s outstanding authority and most prolific writer on butterflies. Theodore Lyman was an accomplished zoologist who also became a congressman. There was William James, the philosopher; Albert S. Bickmore, who decided to found his own museum—the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Frederic Putnam became a Harvard professor of American anthropology and was instrumental in the growth of most of the country’s anthropological museums. Alpheus Hyatt, who is said to have learned all of Agassiz’s Essay on Classification by heart, became a professor of zoology and paleontology at M.I.T. and was one of the founders of the famous marine biological laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Alpheus S. Packard, one of Agassiz’s student-assistants and later a teacher at Penikese, wrote Guide to the Study of Insects, the first major American textbook of entomology. Edward Sylvester Morse, one of those students Harvard would never have taken under normal circumstances, introduced modern methods of classification to Japan, became a sparkling lecturer, writer, museum director, and with Putnam, Hyatt, and Packard founded the American Naturalist.
Agassiz’s son, Alexander, who was trained by his father and served as his principal museum assistant, became a leading zoologist, a pioneer in oceanography, and made a fortune in copper mining, much of which he ultimately devoted to the museum and other work begun by his father. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, in less than a decade after her husband’s death, became a founder of Radcliffe College, and was its first president.
In all the surviving accounts in which those who knew Louis Agassiz strive to describe and explain the hold he had on his time, the enthusiasm he generated, his charm and powers as expositor and leader, one theme remains constant: the quality of the man’s commitment. Silliman used the word engaged. William James told a story.
James had been a member of the expedition to Brazil and had his hammock slung next to Agassiz on the deck of the steamer that carried the party up the Amazon. Late one night, lying sleepless as the engines throbbed and the jungle slipped by under a full moon, he heard Agassiz whisper, “James, are you awake?” then continue, “I cannot sleep. I am too happy; I keep thinking of all those glorious plans.”