Agassiz had looked upon and handled thousands and thousands of fossil fishes which had so puzzled scientists that they had discreetly left them alone. He had set them in an order which helped to explain the great layers of the earth and their formation. He had not been contented because the first numbers of his Fossil Fishes had captured the attention of scientists the world over; he pushed on to more books of greater perfection. Behind this insatiable demand for the supreme result lay his ill-judged attempts to achieve it. He could never be quite nearsighted enough to weigh and count the cost of perfection. He could only recognize it, and demand its achievement. Now he had classified specimens without end, none of which he had originally possessed but all of which he managed to examine, explain, and leave clearly drawn and labeled. Never for him, the minute study of the problem of one circulatory system, one muscle, one small dividing cell.
The man on the mountain top sees far views, and Agassiz had had his vision of an icebound earth which he could not leave unshared. To all of his other projects demanding time, exploration, accurate records, was added this new and unrelated one. Instead of paying the slightest attention to advice about concentrating his efforts, he said, “Nonsense! All I need is a little more help on the mechanical end of it. I will have me a secretary of the quality of Cuvier’s assistant,” for Louis had always cherished a secret longing for the able, selfless helper who had belonged body and soul to Cuvier in the old Paris days. With his salary raised from four hundred to six hundred dollars, Agassiz found the idea irresistible.
After this fashion, Edouard Desor entered the Agassiz family. He was to have a room in the apartment, board at a near-by pension, and whenever he needed any money, Louis would give it to him if he happened to have it. An incredibly Utopian arrangement which worked for a while. For Desor was like many a college graduate of today; he had his degree and his excellent records, and no job. He was willing to do anything, which was exactly what he had to do. Then, being a highly intelligent young man, he listened to Agassiz who could no more help teaching than he could help breathing, and soon the secretary became a very reputable naturalist.
But the Agassiz home was, in the reasonable opinion of the wife who had to manage it, becoming overcrowded. During the summer Louis had considerately stayed with her, working off his energy with enthusiastic lectures about the ice age. A new baby was coming and Cily needed him. But when the little girl, Ida, was born in August, his consideration vanished. Desor would be no trouble at all, and there was that extra room that might just as well be used, and Alexander was nearly two years old anyway; things would go like clockwork. But it was a clock that whirred crazily and struck at odd times, and moreover needed someone to wind it. Cily couldn’t, and Louis hadn’t the time.
The month after the baby’s birth, the good Pastor Agassiz, sage adviser and close friend of his heedless son, died in his parsonage and left Rose bereft of her life companionship. The parsonage was closed and Madame Agassiz was left free, with the freedom of the bereft, to make her home among her children. A wise and sympathetic mother, she had yet to adjust to the life of mother-in-law. It was no easy situation for either of the women, and when Madame Agassiz came for her turn with Louis, Cily frequently took her babies and fled to Carlsruhe and the admiration and understanding of home. And while she was gone, the house was run as never before! Everyone at his own work, in his own place; meals on time; no domestic interruptions to disturb high thought; Rose Agassiz always knew what her son needed, and how to give it to him. But Rose Agassiz was no longer a wife, and she had no other distractions.
This arrangement suited Louis down to the ground. Now he could at a moment’s notice pack his rucksack, capture a willing companion, and disappear into the mountains for as long as his college appointments set him free. He could come back without any more notice, tired, happy, hungry, accompanied by half a dozen guests whom he had picked up on the way, and in a short time they might all be sure of a good supper and peace to talk over the trip until they could keep their eyes open no longer. Louis loved his wife, but he didn’t miss her.
So engrossing did he find his work, his students, his explorations that when, as so often happens if a man no longer needs them, offers of new positions came to him, he refused them without hesitation. Lausanne wanted him, and all of Agassiz’s kin and old friends in the Canton de Vaud urged his return. Geneva had decided that Agassiz was the one man indispensable to them now, and offered more salary, plenty of aid, a chance to teach the ladies on the side, and even a possible museum with an apartment for himself in it, in as heartfelt a letter as is often included in a business proposition. Louis declined both offers and thought no more about them. He was, however, greatly pleased with his nomination to the Royal Society of London; that sort of appreciation meant something to him.
The mountains had Louis now where he could not get away. Under his teaching, through his writing, into the very web of living were shot the ideas about those slow-moving glaciers which demanded proof from him, and more proof. And if that proof took him far afield, so much the better. Because unquestionably, Louis Agassiz was enjoying himself! Given a chance to whet his wits and use his splendid body at the same time, and Louis worked to the sound of huge laughter.
“And is that boy, perhaps, the son of the great Agassiz at Neuchâtel?” asked the old man who had been watching and listening in the little restaurant at Grindelwald. “They call him by that name.” Nor would he believe what they told him. Agassiz, himself, indeed! But Agassiz was, indeed, being most completely himself.
Back in Neuchâtel the work piled up. The secretary naturalist, Desor, was becoming more naturalist than secretary which was satisfactory to him but had its drawbacks for Agassiz. The solution seemed fairly simple to them both; if one helper was not enough, get another. Louis swung readily into his system of securing as much help as a man could get when he had no money to pay for it.
He had promised a place for young Karl Vogt as soon as he had his doctor’s degree, and Karl was now ready for the job. He was a big, clumsy cub of a boy who was always called the Bernese bear. He loved to laugh, and better still, to make others laugh at him. Louis liked nothing better himself, except work, and young Karl could supply both needs. As for the money end of it, they could reduce expenses nicely by giving both Desor and Vogt all of their board; it really took no more food to feed them, and they would add immeasurably to the pleasure of eating. Louis could never have too many brilliant talkers around him at his meals. If Cily and the babies found it difficult to fit into such a group, at least his mother knew how to manage the house. Karl Vogt came to Neuchâtel and stayed five years.
But Desor knew so much now about the business of being a naturalist that he felt he should have an assistant. Agassiz remembered Gressly, a strange, primitive creature whom he had discovered at the meeting of the Swiss naturalists, so strange, so primitive, so daft, that if he had not read his brilliant manuscript about fossils, he would have believed the man quite mad. But Agassiz knew an original observer when he saw one, and it mattered nothing to him if he stammered with timidity when he talked, so long as he contributed something. Louis had sense enough not to include in his household a man who slept with his clothes on and rarely changed them, but he paid a small sum for his board at a poor inn which suited Gressly admirably. He stayed in it only when he was not roaming about the mountains where all the farmers knew him and took him in to amuse their children. Gressly probably cost Agassiz less than any help he ever had. Even when Louis gave the wanderer a sum of money, Gressly would forget that he had it until Agassiz pulled it out of his pocket on his return. And from those great pockets and homespun sacks, he would pull, too, priceless fossils the like of which no one had seen.
Gressly, who had no more business sense than Agassiz, who had the simplicity of a child and the wisdom of the ages, who saw into the secrets of the earth with strange illuminated eyes, Gressly was a man made for Louis Agassiz. But he was no help to Desor, nor to Vogt. When the two young m
en caught him at work with his fossils in the laboratory, and slashed at him with cruel jibes and tormented him with their practical jokes, he was too absorbed to notice them and went on cleaning his rare fossil with his tongue. Too strangely detached he was to be human, too learned withal to bend his mind to Desor’s needs.
For that purpose the young son of a peasant of Concise was added to the Neuchâtel establishment, an intelligent youth named Charles Girard who was willing to run errands and take abuse if he might learn. A good boy, who certainly earned his right to be called a naturalist! For now until Agassiz left Neuchâtel, the pace was so swift that an errand boy must have been left breathless at the end of the day.
The household at Neuchâtel where Louis had brought his bride so few years ago, had turned into a science laboratory which existed only to house and feed its workers. Strange young men took over the rooms and called them their own. The dinner table of Cily’s dreams, with herself and her handsome husband at either end listening to the children who sat between them, was a refectory bench where unkempt men lounged, and smoked ill-smelling pipes, and talked incessantly about laboratory problems. If to Madame Agassiz it brought surcease to her loneliness, to Cily it must have seemed no place for a gentlewoman to bring up her children.
11. THE JUBILANT MOUNTAINS
The work piled up, the assistants squabbled, the lithography gathered debts and distractions, the household milled about him, but none of his problems could get Louis Agassiz down. Part of his immunity came from splendid health which lets a man deride the devils that beset him; part from his temperament which came to him well dipped in sunshine and which never lost its warmth and light. Now without an escape, even his brave vigor might have been submerged. But Louis could never founder while mountains last.
They were his escape where new life poured into him. And as humble payment he sought to tell the world of their wonders. When he had huddled over a microscope until it had no more to offer him except aching eyes; when he had listened to the roar of troubled waters in his household until his ears were deafened to anything sweeter; when debts seized him by the throat so that his lungs had no more freedom of clean air; then he stood up and stretched, high and long, and said to anyone who could hear him through the din, “Let’s see what the glaciers are doing.”
Sometimes a few ears were tuned to hear him, sometimes more. He never went alone. With all the food that the pantry could furnish, with woolen clothes and spiked boots, with high spirits that grew higher as the village lay behind them, he would lead his little band up the mountain sides. First a day, and back at night, then a night at a hostel as high as they could find one, and then at last the need for a hut of their own where they could come at will, and leave their instruments, and stay long enough for real measurements and observations. For these trips with all their laughter and adventure were by way of being no picnic! The ice age was no longer a mad theory but a sound enough proposition to need only more evidence for universal acceptance.
Nor were the adventures boys’ play. Trips which began with a day, two days, grew into a week, ten days, more, until the climbers discovered themselves to be Titans undaunted by any height. From peak to peak they crawled and crept over unmarked trails until their travels sound like the itinerary of modern Switzerland without its ease. Up the Bernese Alps through Thun to Interlaken, down from Bex to St. Maurice to the valley of Chamonix, over Zermatt and the Grimsel; today we look through the windows of a comfortable car, past the crowds of tourists, to their high gleam, but what can we know about their cold passionate beauty as yet untouched by men? Or of the danger and excitement which to mountain climbers is like a fever mounting with the heights?
Yet it was not the fever which abates only with achievement of a destined peak. Louis and his little band always climbed with purposeful eyes. Not for the sake of the climb, or the peak, but for the giant traces of the massive ice-flow under them now, small broken sections of that massive sheet of early æons. Then, in characteristic Agassiz fashion, when new proofs offered themselves, he would rush off to France where the Geological Society was decorously meeting, seize them by the ears with tales of all that he had just seen in the Bernese Oberland, and before they knew what had happened to them, rush them out in an excursion to Bienne which must have left them worn to shreds, but, which was more important to Agassiz, convinced them of his glacial theory. Then off, full speed, to Freiburg where the German naturalists were meeting to repeat his arguments which gathered force as he went, even as the glaciers. And back to Neuchâtel ready to shoulder again the burdens of debt and dissension. But make no mistake, Louis liked his way of living!
At last in the summer of 1840, when he was thirty-three, the time came for something more permanent for a base than the cabin of the monk, Hugi, which greatly to Louis’ delight had actually moved along with the glacier as he measured it, and which to his lesser pleasure now disappeared entirely. Never mind, it had proved his point about the advance of glaciers, and convinced his opponents. It was time they had a cabin of their own. He selected a huge slate block which offered an overhanging roof of sorts. He found a mason who could close it in with a wall at one side, and how he must have enjoyed the construction! He hung a blanket for a door, and in the most sheltered corner located his kitchen and dining room. Sleeping quarters were anywhere that there happened to be room. Under another big rock the explorers stored their provisions which four porters brought over from the hospice of the Grimsel. And on the evening of the day when the work began, they moved in, a good example of the methods of Louis Agassiz.
“We shall call it Hôtel des Neuchâtelois,” he decided that night, and the next day the mason added a finishing touch with the engraved letters of the name on the block. Then as they had time, the first occupants added their names where they stood like distinguished doorplates, and where later, other great names joined them. Of them all, L. AGASSIZ 1840, imprinted itself in largest letters at the top of the boulder. Which was, as everyone including Agassiz agreed, as it should be.
So they set to work. They picked out eighteen great boulders on the glaciers, and with the help of an excellent engineer, put them under a series of as careful tests and measurements as the most modern methods could furnish. At regular intervals for years the boulders were measured for the rate of motion and its variability during seasons, and according to location on the glacier. They computed the amount of melting and the results of the melting. They climbed all of the peaks pronounced inaccessible as part of their job, and their spirits rose in direct proportion to the heights.
At three o’clock of one gray misty morning, they snatched a hasty breakfast and tramped out through the fog for the Strahleck. The guides promised the sun, and the sun upheld their word. Up and up and up, through soft snow, cutting slippery ice steps, tied together in little human knots on a frail line, up and up for six hours until they stood on the shining floor of the peak. Around them and over them and under them, the gleaming mountains, the sun dazzling valleys. They set their instruments safely down in the clean unbroken snow, untied the knots that bound them together, and fell to dancing and wrestling until the echoes rang, and a herd of timid chamois stretched curious heads over the rocks. Then the wrestlers and dancers stood quiet, watching, until the chamois galloped away; and fell to wrestling again. For so, at the end of six hours’ strain, could Louis Agassiz jubilate!
An hour of observations, a bite of lunch, and they tied themselves together again and slipped like our modern skiers over slopes, across crevasses, ever more swiftly, until to the astonishment of Grindelwald they leaped into it at three o’clock of the afternoon. And no one at the Inn would believe a word of their tale.
The mountains had no terrors for this runner of their peaks. He seemed to come home to them as his source of well-being. When he found his Hôtel des Neuchâtelois so buried in snow that its roof was only a faint curve in the smooth surface, he flung himself down beside it and looked and looked at the deep shining space, until he rose, renewe
d. With one guide, he stayed on and made his observations. And at the end of a day which began at four in the morning, he tramped back to the Grimsel where there was no one but envied him after he had finished his saga of the day.
If there was special danger, he took it; but not as danger, because he did not know how to fear it. Down under the glacier were strange wells which baffled him. Surface measurements could not reach them with accuracy; he must see for himself how far the blue ribbons of ice penetrated.
“We will dig a new bed for the stream,” he said, and deflected the water from his well. Over the jagged hole he rigged a tripod to which he attached a board swung by ropes. He was now ready to descend into the center of the earth sitting on a swing such as a boy might attach to an apple tree. A friend flattened himself out on the ice to watch the descent and call out directions. Louis waved a high salute, and if terror was in his heart it is in the wings of birds when they fly!
Down he slid through the blue ribbons of ice, his frail board threatened by the slice of needled icicles against its ropes, down, slowly down, for eighty feet in the pale frozen light. Then the well divided, and the large entrance proved impassible. Never mind, he would try the other. They hauled him up far enough to enter the small hole and down he went again. Watching every inch of the way, intent upon discovering the last blue band in that translucent wall, he forgot that a well must have a bottom until his feet plunged into icy water. He yelled, but one hundred twenty-five feet is a long way for a signal to travel correctly. The men carefully lowered him into the bitter depth. This time Louis’ objections reached the surface. Up he came, slowly, and more dangerously than he went down, steering his swing between deadly stalactites, almost too numb to hold the ropes. But out at last, and soon warm from pummeling his assistants. It was, he admitted, a little more dangerous than he had expected, and perhaps it might be better not to try it unless urged by a strong scientific motive. But that was advice for others, not himself.
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