The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack

by Emily Cheney Neville

  Adam Sedgwick, nearly fifty now, had been President of the British Association for a year. He and Richard Owen were recognized men of science who were able and quite willing to offer a hand to a man who saw their value and who would take nothing away from it. Here as ever the appreciation which Louis honestly felt helped him to create his own welcome.

  In this year of Agassiz’s first visit to England, he could have found men who were making literature as he was making science. But he probably had as little time and interest for them as they had for him. Yet they were all creating the nineteenth-century golden age; and no man is free from another. Sir Walter Scott had finished his share of the work two years before, and left behind him his rich romantic legacy. Lord Macaulay was not yet a lord nor had he stepped into his writing stride. A man in his thirties, he had just gone to India for a seat on the supreme council. Louis Agassiz had probably never heard of him. Charles Dickens was a promising young writer in his early twenties who was prospecting with the idea of Pickwick. Another young fellow of the same age named William Makepeace Thackeray was contemplating an idea for a novel which he thought he might call Vanity Fair. These young men might have enjoyed a glass of ale with the Swiss stranger who seemed so radiantly adjusted to life that he overlooked most of its dark qualities, but they probably would have shaken their heads over him when he had taken himself and his magnetism off to some museum.

  Agassiz might well have met the crusty Carlyle in London where he had dragged Jane after the agony of the fire in Edinburgh which destroyed his first volume of The French Revolution. But a man like Carlyle could probably never abide the optimism of an Agassiz, and it may be well that their ways were apart. Yet curiously enough a man whom Agassiz was to know in his own America had visited Carlyle in Edinburgh just the year before Agassiz viewed with such admiration its collections. The serenity of this guest, Ralph Waldo Emerson, seemed in no way upset by Carlyle’s moroseness, and perhaps Agassiz might have escaped, too. But as far as we know the matter was never put to a test.

  Edinburgh, too, had been placed at the service of Audubon who had exhibited his pictures there. Audubon, a man of almost fifty now, should have been as older blood brother to Agassiz. Alike they were as brothers, impulsive, vigorous, magic in their touch. Careless of all ties except the one to which their genius bound them. Ready at any instant to leave wife, family, comfort, life itself if necessary, to go humbly and lightheartedly on its errands. Perhaps their very likeness would, as with brothers, have set them to disagreeing because, after all, neither of these men liked to share admiration and attention. But because Audubon had peddled his wild and beautiful birds from one end of the world to the other, the people where he had passed knew now something about the value, and the expense, of a scientist’s drawings. Fossil fishes had none of the glamour of flying birds, and it may have been well that Agassiz was not the pioneer in engaging interest sufficient to pay good money for a man’s original plates. Even with the approval of scholarly science, he had a hard enough time!

  Here, then, were some of the men upon whom was laid the responsibility of creating whatever the world had to offer at that time as its particular achievement. Each one intent upon his own share of the work, and with little concern for the others. Yet somehow all together presenting to us of the twentieth century a rich and varied tapestry that we are pleased to call the romantic period, and that we shall do well to have equaled when the year 2000 calls us to account. Probably our contribution will have the same kind of unity when it is finished, and probably not until then will it be evident that our separateness is even now part of a whole. For no man is free from another!

  10. A LABORATORY-HOME

  Louis was back in Neuchâtel where the long dreary winter had already settled in. Behind him was green England, its orderly museums, its well-bred scientists who had a fine appreciation of him, its wealth and culture and ease. Before him was his small isolated college with its cramped resources, its hard work, its limited recognition. Louis fought his nostalgia for the life he had left by the hard work which home demanded. But he promptly delivered an enticing lecture about London which eased his longing somewhat.

  Then he got to work on his new interest, echinoderms, which had served him as a form of recreation, and began to publish some of his observations. Out of the mountains he dug the exquisite imprints of the sea: starfish carved into the rock without a broken ray, sea urchins their spines intact, delicate sea lilies, each one a clearly signed affidavit of the stratum in which it was imbedded. Years afterward when Louis crouched over the pools of Nahant and watched the faint rhythm of motion stir along living rays which clung fast to the rocks, they were fossils come alive to him. Perhaps no more alive than when he cut them out of the mountains and called them by name.

  He found new species as he worked on his fossils, he classified them into orderly arrangement, he wrote about them with the ease and enjoyment of a hobby, and he produced as usual careful and expensive plates. He contributed to zoology a sound classification of echinoderms, and to geology a clear exposition of their relation to the periods of formation of the mountain strata. An end result which seemed to justify the pursuit of pleasure in Louis even if he had not needed all the enjoyment he could get.

  His close work with the microscope had strained his eyes so severely that he had even known the dark shadow of blindness close behind him. And if that dread could not shake his indomitable spirit, nothing could. But he had darkened his room, and trained his sense of touch even to his tongue’s tip until he could recognize his fossils without seeing them. Then, free again, his eyes got better; and he went on with another fine and sensitive tool for his work. Now the eyes were bothering him again, and his friend, Humboldt, who knew all his ills, begged him to take care of them. Louis had learned his lesson, however, and because of it he had a useful pair of eyes at his service all his life.

  Humboldt was the enduring kind of friend in whom Louis could confide not only the ills of the body but the perplexities of the spirit. Cily troubled him deeply, when he had time to think about her. She had borne with the long lonely summer among alien people because, after all, Louis would return before the bitter dark winter closed in, and Louis could bring light even into the shadow of the wintry mountains. Louis had returned, so fired with zeal for the new ideas which he had gathered that there was little warmth or light for poor Cily. Nor did he even guess wherein he lacked. His mother had always given him the sympathy and understanding which, in spite of his assurance, he could not get along without now; and she had asked for nothing in return except his love which she knew without proof was hers. If a wife could not give him this succor—and that was all that he asked of her, except of course, to keep his house and to separate herself from kin and friends—then who could? The puzzled young husband speculated about the problems of domesticity to Humboldt who had none, and who gave him comforting but discreet sympathy. “It is not enough,” he wrote, “to be praised and recognized as a great and profound naturalist;”—words to soothe a sore spirit—“to this one must add domestic happiness as well.” Ah, but how? But how?

  Spring seemed to bring the answer. Cily laid aside all her drawings, whether of specimens or angels, and devoted herself to the baby who was coming to fill her empty life. No lonely summer for her this year! She would go to her Carlsruhe home where every attention and comfort would be hers. Louis could wander at will through the British Isles without leaving her to count the days until his return.

  Louis most joyfully took his young wife, doubly dear now, to her home, bade her a tender good-bye, and rushed off to England, full speed. He left behind him a Cily who was contented; in safe hands. He was free as the eagle which soared over his mountains. It probably wouldn’t have occurred to him that the eagle was after food for his family!

  Off to England again, in eager haste to see what Dinkel had accomplished during these winter months. Not enough. Another artist was imperative. He at once hired another Munich friend and set him to work. T
he expenses piled up until the wary publisher threw up his hands and abandoned his extravagant author for good. “Very well,” said Louis Agassiz who had no business sense whatever, “I will be my own publisher,” Just how, he didn’t know, but said he intrepidly, “Having begun it, I have no alternative; my only safety is in success. I have a firm conviction that I shall bring my work to a happy issue, though often in the evening I hardly know how the mill is to be turned tomorrow.”

  Ah, but, assured his genius, there is no real need to worry about that. We will see to your mill. And sent him off to a meeting of the British Association in Dublin where they appropriated him another hundred guineas, and signed up for many subscriptions of his work upon English fossil fishes. A matter for celebration, which was thoroughly attended to at the seat of Lord Enniskillen where Louis made the halls ring with carefree old Munich laughter. Louis did like the British Isles!

  But the fall came, and back to Neuchâtel he had to go. To be plunged instantly into its projects, his investigations, his papers, his publications, and finally in December a new and absorbing interest, his small son, Alexander. Alexander, for his old friend and his brother-in-law. A fine boy who filled Cily’s life to the brim. Louis could spend his days with sea urchins and starfish if he liked; she had her little boy. And an excellent mother she was to him. She was pleased when Alexander was two months old that England awarded her husband, besides the money prize, the Wollaston medal which had never been bestowed on so young a naturalist; but on the other hand, had anyone ever seen so young a baby take notice? It was extraordinary, and very satisfying.

  When summer came Louis had no mind to let this amazing child go off to Carlsruhe with his mother. England was all right, but not when it meant dispensing with a new and marvellous son. They must find some pleasant resort in the Alps. But people stayed at home in those days, and resorts were few. Cily didn’t like the Swiss women anyway.

  Don’t think for a minute, observed his genius, that you are going to take a holiday from the work you are meant to do. Remember that invitation that de Charpentier gave you? Louis recalled. Ah, just the thing! A charming German wife whom Cily would surely like, a beautiful home near Bex where brilliant people dropped in as house guests, a host who had a rich collection of natural history. Of course Louis did not agree with de Charpentier in his odd theories about glaciers and their transportation of boulders, but it would be stimulating to argue about the matter. They would find lodgings at once near Bex.

  Cecile was radiant. The baby was six months old and no trouble to anybody. At last a trip was planned to include her, and few enough travels had come her way. She stood at the window of their lodgings and looked out on as fair a valley as ever Carlsruhe had laid before her eyes. Green orchards and vineyards stretching through to the very opening of the Valais. Even the Dent du Midi had none of that forbidding look of the Neuchâtel country. She felt warmed and heartened as if she had come home.

  If Neuchâtel had produced but one person like Mrs. de Charpentier, she thought she could have borne it. Here was a woman who had all the grace of one born to it, who lived as life should be lived. Cily’s defenses, built up against her rugged Swiss neighbors, fell away before this gentle woman and her engaging little daughter. She bloomed out of her pale discontent into the kind of person she was meant to be.

  Louis for the first time had a contented family and the stimulus of his beloved science. With such happiness added to his ordinary zest, no wonder the mountains gave up their secrets to him. For now, instead of refuting the glacier arguments as he had expected, Louis found himself swept away by them. Swept far beyond the limits which even their protagonists had set. He perceived, weighed, and accepted in a few weeks material which it had taken de Charpentier and Venetz seven years to collect. True, he said of their conclusions. It was the glacier moving through the Rhone valley which dropped these boulders, not the freshets and floods. It was the glacier which polished and scratched their surfaces. And if here, why not elsewhere when cold prevailed all over the earth? We shall see. And so was born the concept of the ice age. Agassiz’s genius had prophesied correctly that the trip to Bex was not to be a vacation.

  Yet it had all the earmarks and all the rewards of a vacation. De Charpentier was a man after Agassiz’s own heart. He loved to talk, to gather brilliant people about his table, to drink good wine, to sharpen ideas against the blade of quick thought; and then to stride over the mountains to prove the truth of his speculations. He cared nothing for fame, however, and only the urge of his guest drove him into publication. A strange quirk of character to Louis who would share every idea that he created.

  Now Agassiz remembered Karl Schimper, the lad who, with Alex Braun, made up the trio in Munich. Nothing would do but Schimper must share these latest discoveries. He sent for his friend to come and stay with him, and as in the old days Schimper came and did stay. Stayed through the summer, stayed on with de Charpentier after Agassiz had gone, stayed at Neuchâtel with Louis into the winter. And always, always, carried on the stimulating discussions about the ice age. Until at last he thought that he had invented it. He forgot the generous hospitality of Louis whose home he had taken over—and how Cily must have suffered when she was pushed into the background again;—he forgot how his mind had cleared with simple living when released from hard drinking; he claimed the whole Eiszcit idea and dragged his claim and his brilliant self down into obscurity. A bitter loss to Agassiz who loved and trusted his friends.

  But friends, or wife, or child, or poverty, could not hold Louis back once he had started on the high adventure of capturing a new idea. Agassiz’s devotion to the ice age brought him followers and fame in time, but the losses were heavy along the way. Von Buch who had had his eye on the brilliant young man for a professorship at Berlin, gave him up as a hopeless blower of bubbles. Humboldt begged him not to allow himself to be diverted from zoology to considerations which convinced only those who gave them birth. Finish what you have begun, he pled, knowing well that Louis had no such habit. “No more ice,” he finishes his letter, “not much of echinoderms, plenty of fish, recall of ambassadors in partibus (meaning poor Dinkel), and great severity toward the book-sellers, an infernal race, two or three of whom have been killed under me.” Louis listened to them all, but who could make a man of sense out of this runner of the mountain tops! He dodged under their arms, and when next they looked, he stood on a new peak.

  Louis was back in Neuchâtel with a burning new interest for which the little town and its mountains served as a perfect laboratory. Now whenever he had an hour, a half day, a weekend, he called to anyone who would accompany him, and scoured the familiar countryside for strange exciting proofs of his theory of the ice age. He found plenty of them, so unmistakable that they scarcely needed Agassiz’s fertile imagination to interpret them. When the Helvetic Association gathered together at Neuchâtel in the summer, expecting to hear from its president more about his fossil fishes, it was somewhat astounded to listen to a fiery discourse which informed them that a sheet of ice had once covered the earth. “Siberian winter,” he told them, “established itself for a time over a world previously covered with a rich vegetation and peopled with a large mammalia, similar to those now inhabiting the warm regions of India and Africa. Death enveloped all nature in a shroud, and the cold, having reached its highest degree, gave to this mass of ice, at the maximum of tension, the greatest possible hardness.”

  Note the economy of this statement, and its vivid quality. Agassiz knew how to make the unreal seem real. Yet even his magnetism could not prevent such mad statements from going unchallenged. Nor of course, did he want to. Agassiz loved nothing better than an argument. And to strengthen his arguments, he applied himself to obtaining more and more proof.

  A busy, busy man in those days! One sometimes wonders if his strength had been limited like Darwin’s, he might have achieved more. He would not, certainly, have attacked so many problems at once. Or would he? Temperament is sometimes stronger than the bo
dy. At least Agassiz kept alive and well under pressure that would have killed another man.

  When he had come back from the summer at Bex, renewed in all directions, he decided to start his own lithography, a good idea for a millionaire. He now had twenty men at work in it, producing his work with a degree of perfection which any man of science longs for and never gets.

  But producing his own books did not pay the expenses. In his search for manuscripts to keep the lithography going, he chose unwisely and continued to pile up debts and trouble. A man like Agassiz certainly needed a hobby or two like an ice age which demanded his flight to the mountains now and then.

  Yet in spite of bad judgment, debts and disagreements, Louis Agassiz at thirty was a man of importance in science. Men might object to what he had to say, but they listened to him. If for nothing else than because he was original enough to deal a shock of some sort whenever he made an announcement. Louis had an unusual capacity for keeping anyone, including himself, out of a rut. Yet so honest and so earnest was he, that he was ever free from any suspicion of posing as a radical. He was like a farsighted man who saw great distances from his mountain top and who was impelled to tell what he saw. The problems of the nearsighted, microscopic organisms, the business of making money, domestic difficulties, almost anything practical and necessary, were out of his range. But someone with clear, distant sight needs to scan far horizons for coming storms, and for the rising sun. Someone has to reduce order out of an untouched chaos. Then there will follow plenty of small important problems for the myopic scientist.