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 tha
t 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 wh
en 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.)
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