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 c
hurch. 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 prev
ailing 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.
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