MEN OF SCIENCE
In England, in the fall of 1870, I missed an opportunity to see the
great scientific men of the time. Faraday was still active, and in the
full ripeness of his fame. Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Joseph Hooker,
Joule, Lyell, Murchison were in the midst of their best work, and
probably all or most of them were present at the meeting of the
British Association, which took place that year somewhere in the west
of England. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, with whom I had for some time
maintained a correspondence, growing out of the interest I felt in her
_Intuitive Morals_, and other writings, invited me to accompany
her to the meeting, at which, introduced by her, I might have had
interesting interviews. I let the chance go by, and feel to-day that
my memory stands impoverished in that it holds no first-hand knowledge
of the lights, who in their century were the glory of their country
and the world.
In Germany I was more fortunate. Arriving at Heidelberg at a time
before its high prestige had suffered much diminution, I found in all
the four Faculties men of great distinction. One hears that in the
stern centralising to which since 1870 Germany has been subjected the
outer universities have suffered, their strength, their able teachers,
namely, being drawn away for a brilliant concentration at Berlin.
In the little university town of those days students and professors
rubbed closely and great men were sometimes found in odd environments.
Expressing once a desire to see a certain venerable theologian of wide
fame, I was told he was sure to be found on such and such evenings
in a well-known _bier locale_, and there I had opportunity to
observe him, an aged and withered figure, with a proper stein of
the amber fluid frothing at his side, and a halo from an active pipe
enwreathing his grey hair, as he joked and gossiped familiarly with
his fellow-loiterers about the heavy oak table. At another time I was
among surroundings less rough, the guest-room of a club of the finer
world, curtained and carpeted, and made attractive with pictures,
flowers, and music. A company of ladies and gentlemen sat sipping
_Maiwein_ and _Mark gräfler_, while a conjurer entertained
them with his tricks. During one of these, desiring a confederate from
the lookers-on, he approached a slender and refined-looking man, who
was following the necromancer's proceedings with as much interest as
anybody. The wizard's air of deference, and the respectful looks of
the company led me to infer that he was a man above the common, but
he took part affably in what was going on, helped out the trick, and
laughed and wondered with the rest when it succeeded. I presently
learned to my surprise and amusement that the amiable confederate of
the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in
fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the
initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has
long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a
ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and
narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had
either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant.
Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club,
detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another
according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world
became aware of a discovery of vast moment. The light of the sun,
and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be analysed or
spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning
there in the immensely distant spaces. We can know what constitutes
a star as unerringly as we know the constituents of the earth. Still
more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had
reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism
to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division.
In fact here was a method of chemical and physical analysis, much more
powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and
the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe
deepened and widened wondrously. I sat often among the crowd of
students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate
features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were
a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand,
the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the
apparatus with which the magician solved the universe. Once, as I
stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture
toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances. In the
depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a
tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye. But it is
interesting to think that for a moment once I held the attention of so
potent a Prospero.
In those days the name of Kirchoff was coupled always with that of
an associate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of
spectrum-analysis; and in my time at Heidelberg, Bunsen was at hand
and I became as familiar with his figure as with Kirchoff. In frame
Bunsen was of the burly burgomaster type not rare among the Teutons,
and as I saw him in his laboratory to which I sometimes gained access
through students of his, he moved about in some kind of informal
_schlafrock_ or working dress of ample dimensions, with his
large head crowned by a peculiar cap. On the tables within the spaces
flickered numerously the "Bunsen burners," his invention, and it
was easy to fancy as one saw him, surrounded by the large company of
reverent disciples, that you were in the presence of the hierophant
of some abstruse and mysterious cult, in whose honour waved the many
lambent flames. I think he was unmarried, without domestic ties, and
lived almost night and day among his crucibles and retorts, devoted to
his science and pupils toward whom he showed a regard almost fatherly.
In his lecture-room, in more formal dress he was less picturesque, but
still a man to arouse deep interest. He was in the front rank of the
chemists of all time, and I suppose had equal merit with Kirchoff in
the momentous discovery in which their names are linked.
There was, however, at this time in Heidelberg a scientist probably
of greater prestige than even these, whose contemporary influence was
more dominant, and whose repute is now, and likely to be hereafter
more prevailing. In my walks in a certain quiet street, I sometimes
met a man who made an unusual impression of dignity and power. He
had the bearing of a leader of men in whatever sphere he might move,
massive and well-statured, his dress not obtrusive but carefully
appointed, with an eye and face to command. His manner was courteous,
not domineering, and I wondered who the able, high-bred gentleman
might be, for he carried all that in his air as he passed along the
street. It was the illustrious Helmholtz, then in his best years,
with great achievements behind him and before. His researches in many
fields were profound and far extending. I suppose his genius was
at its best when dealing with the pervasive imponderable ether that
extends out from the earth into the vast planetary spaces in whose
vibrations are conditioned the phenomena of light. No subject of
investigation can be more elusive. The mind that could grapple with
this and arrive at the secrets and laws of the subtle medium through
which the human eye receives impression is indeed worthy of our
veneration. Probably, excepting Humboldt, no German scientist in these
later centuries has reached such eminence. The fields of the two
men were widely different. The one we know best as the scientific
traveller, roaming the earth over, and reducing to ordered knowledge
what can be perceived of its fauna and flora, of the strata that
underlie it, the oceans that toss upon it, the atmosphere that
surrounds it. The other roved not widely, but keeping to his lenses
and calculations, penetrated perhaps more profoundly. Helmholtz, a
well-born youth, began his career as a surgeon in the Prussian army,
and his service there, no doubt, contributed to the manly carriage
for which he was conspicuous. He married a lady of a noble house of
Wuertemberg, and moved in an environment conducive to courtly manners.
Heidelberg, like the German universities in general well understood
that ability in its teachers, and not a pompous architectural
display, makes a great institution. Its buildings were scattered and
unpretending. Helmholtz had a lecture-room and laboratory apart, in
a structure modern and graceful, but modest in its appeal. Here he
discoursed to reverent throngs in tones never loud or confident. It is
for wiseacres and charlatans to declaim and domineer. The masters
are deferential in the presence of the sublimities and of the
intelligences they are striving to enlighten.
In Germany I saw the great lights of science from afar, coming into
relations of intimacy only with one or two _privat-docents_,
young men struggling precariously for a foothold. One such striver I
came to know well, a young man gifted but physically crippled, who,
being anxious to get up his English, as I was to get up my German,
entered with me into an arrangement to converse in these alternately.
We were about on a par in our knowledge or ignorance of the speech not
native to us, and helped each other merrily out of the pitfalls into
which we stumbled, according as English or German ruled the time.
I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German
acquaintances that while a married man, I had _deserted_ and
_cast off_ my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to
say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn. A
treacherous inseparable prefix had imparted to my "leaving them" an
unlooked-for emphasis. The laugh for the moment was on me, but only
for the moment. A little later Knopff was telling me of the old
manuscripts in the library illuminated gorgeously by "de pious and
skilful monkeys of de Middle Ages." He was a bright fellow, and I have
hoped I might encounter his name in some honourable connection. If he
survived it was as one of the _unbekannt_, an affix very dreadful
to young aspirants for university honours.
As regards the men who, during the past seventy-five years have so
greatly widened our scientific knowledge, I have had contact with
those of Germany only for brief periods, and in the outer circle. As
to their American brethren, fate has been more kind to me. I have sat
as a pupil at the feet of the most eminent, and with some I have stood
in the bond of friendship.
Divinity Hall, at Harvard University, has always had a pleasant
seclusion. Near the end of its long, well-shaded avenue, it had in the
rear the fine trees of Norton's Woods, and fifty years ago pleasant
fields stretching before. Of late the Ampelopsis has taken it into its
especial cherishing, draping it with a close green luxuriance that can
scarcely be matched elsewhere. Moreover it is dominated by the lordly
pile of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy. "Whence and what art thou,
execrable shape!" a theologue once exclaimed as the walls were rising,
feeling that there must always be a battle between what the old Hall
stood for and the new building was to foster. But the structures have
gone on in harmony, and many a devotee of science has had hospitable
welcome in the quarters intended for the recruits of what so many
suppose to be the opposing camp. There was a notable case of this kind
in my own time.
One pleasant afternoon a group of "divinities" (Ye gods, that that
should have been our title in the nomenclature of the University!)
were chatting under one of the western porches. Talk turned upon an
instructor, whose hand upon our essays was felt to be soft rather than
critical, and who was, therefore, set low. "By Holy Scripture," broke
out one, "a soft hand is a good thing. A soft hand, sir, turneth away
wrath." The window close by opened into the room of Simon Newcomb, a
youth who had no part in our studies, but of whom we made a chum. In
those days he could laugh at such a joke as it blew in at his window
with the thistle-down,--indeed was capable of such things himself.
It is a bit odd that as I come to write of him, this small witticism
of half a century back should thrust itself obstinately into my
memory, but after all it may not be out of place. The impression of
the greatness of a mountain we get powerfully if the eye can measure
it from the waif of seaweed at low tide up to the snow-cap of the
summit. At this and similar jokes the boy Simon Newcomb connived, as
he moved in our crowd. They were the waifs at low tide from which his
towering mind rose to the measuring of the courses of the stars. He
came among us as a student of the Lawrence scientific school, muscular
and heavy-shouldered from work on shore and at the oar in Nova Scotia.
Though not slovenly, he was the reverse of trim. His rather outlandish
clothes, pressed once for all when they left the shop of the
provincial tailor, held his sturdy elbows and knees in bags moulded
accurately to the capacious joints. His hair hung rebelliously, and
his nascent beard showed an untrained hand at the razor. But his
brow was broad, his eye clear and intelligent, and he was a man to
be reckoned with. He was barely of age, but already a computer in the
_Nautical Almanac_ office, then located at Cambridge, and we
well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon
Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity.
His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid
introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable
resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her
personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and
daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular
he looked toward offspring who should possess high scientific gifts.
With this mind he set out on his courting, and steering clear of vain
entanglements with rather preternatural coolness, at last in a remote
village, satisfied himself that he had found his complement. He
permitted his docile heart to fall in love, and in due course there
was born into the world a great man. The wooing has a humorous
aspect,--this steering of unruly Hymen! The calculated result,
however, did not fail of appearance, and perhaps the world might
profit from such an example. I was strongly drawn toward Simon Newcomb
by his unlikeness to myself. I was town-bred and he full of strength
gained in the fields and along the beach. My own disinclination for
mathematics was marked, but I had a vast admiration for a man to whom
its processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial
fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his
moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon
to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of
heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving
toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his
early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work:
To this work I was especially attracted, because its
preparation seemed to me to embody the highest
intellectual power to which man has ever attained.
The matter used to present itself to my mind somewhat
in this way.... There are tens of thousands
of men who could be successful in all the ordinary
walks of life. Thousands who could gain wealth,
hundreds who could wield empires, for one who
could take up the astronomical problems with any
hope of success. The men who have done it are
therefore in intellect the select few of the human
race, an aristocracy ranking above all others in the
scale of being. The astronomical _ephemeris_ is the
last practical outcome of their productive genius.
In pursuing their lives men no doubt follow the line of least
resistance, and Simon Newcomb here we may be sure was no exception;
thus he chose to deal in his work with the heaviest and most
perplexing problems with which the human intellect can engage. I
do not attempt to describe or estimate what he achieved. Only a few
select minds in his generation were capable of that. At his death the
tributes of those who had a right to speak were unmeasured. Perhaps no
human mind ever attacked more boldly the uttermost difficulties, and
indeed have been more successful in the wrestle. He was set by the
side of Hipparchus, of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Sir Isaac
Newton. In a class thus lofty, his scientific fellows have judged
that he had a title to stand. In their high strivings he was equally
zealous, and his achievement was comparable with theirs. Nevertheless,
had his disposition inclined him, there were many other paths into
which he might have struck with success. His versatility was marked
and he did try his hand at various tasks, at finance, political
economy, belles-lettres. James Bryce, who knew him well, is said to
have seen in him the stuff for a great man-of-affairs, a leader of
armies or a captain of industry. His excursions, however, into such
fields, though sometimes noteworthy in result, were transient and more
or less half-hearted. His allegiance, given so early to the sublimest
of pursuits, held him to the end. The Government of the United States
placed him in its highest scientific position, at the head of the
Naval Observatory, and his serious work from first to last was in the
solemn labyrinths where the stars cross and re-cross, and here he was
one of the most masterful of master-minds.
It was full fifty years since Simon Newcomb and I were boys together
in Divinity Hall. No letter or message had ever passed between us. I
had followed the course of his fame, and felt happy that I had once
known him. Returning to my lodgings, during a sojourn in Washington, I
was told I had had a visitor, a man well on in years, plain in attire,
and rugged-faced. The card he left bore the name "Simon Newcomb." I
sought him out at once, and have rarely felt more honoured than that
my old friend, learning casually of my whereabouts, had felt
the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse. After a
half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man. The big
brow remained and the keen and thoughtful eye. His dress and manner
were simple, as of old. He was entitled to wear the insignia of a
rear-admiral, and had long lived in refined surroundings which might
have made him fastidious. In look and bearing, however, he was the
hearty, friendly man of the Nova Scotia coast, careless of frills and
fine manners.
It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door
of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented
me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who
formed its membership. He moved among them as unostentatious and
simple-mannered as he had been as a boy, with a catholic interest in
all the varying topics which held the sympathies of the crowd,
and able well to hold his own whatever might be the field of the
conversation. Bishop, poet, scientist, historian, he had common ground
with them all. I sat with him in his study, among heaped-up papers
inscribed with the most abstruse and intricate calculations. It did
not affect the warmth of his welcome that I had no partnership
with him in these difficult pursuits. He was broad enough to take
cognizance, too, of the things I cared for. It was hard to feel that
the man there hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic
event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the
planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting,
he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades
and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an
interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at
the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely
stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent,
but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them
and found them sympathetic. In the power of pure intellect I felt I
had never known a greater man.
On an autumn day in the early fifties, as I loitered in the
green-house of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe bare-headed
man, in rough brown attire, came quickly stepping in from the
flower-beds outside. He was in his fullest vigour, his hair more
inclined to stand erect than to lie smooth, his dark eyes full of
animation. It was a noticeably vivid and alert personality, and as he
tossed on to a working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed plants, wet
from a recent shower and bent over them in sharp scrutiny, I knew I
was in the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American botanists.
He had come as a boy from a remote rural district, and with few
advantages, following the bent of a marked scientific genius, he had
won for himself before reaching middle life a leading place. I was
soon to know him better, for it was my fortunate lot to be one in the
crowd of juniors which for a term lined up before him once a week
or so in Holden Chapel. The small peculiarities of great men have an
interest, and the function I am seeking now to fulfil is to make sharp
the ordinary presentment of the eminent characters I touch. I
recall of Asa Gray, that with the class, he sat at his desk behind a
substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row,
his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a
narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the
teacher's head to a sky-light in the roof. Gray's utterance was rather
hesitant. He would catch for his word often, reiterating meanwhile
the article, "the-a, the-a, the-a," his gaze meanwhile fixed upon
the sky-light, and a nervously gyrating forefinger raised high and
brightly illuminated. The thought suggested was that he had a prompter
on the roof to whom he was distressfully appealing to supply the true
phrase. For Professor Gray the truth was in the top rather than the
bottom of the well. Though sometimes long in coming it was the right
thing when it came and clothed his thought properly. Sizing up the
new professor, in our first days with him, as boys will do, some
unconscionable dogs in our front row, assuming an attitude which
Abraham Lincoln afterward made classic, settled back in their chairs
and rested their feet on the rail in front in a position higher than
their heads. The professor, withdrawing his gaze suddenly from the
sky-light, found himself confronted not by expectant faces but by
a row of battered and muddy boot-soles. His face fell; his whirling
forefinger, ceasing to gyrate, tilted like a lance in rest at the
obnoxious cowhide parapet. "Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those
boots"; he ejaculated forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous
clatter. Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite
among our lazy men, of whom there were too many. In calling us up he
began with the A's, following down the class in alphabetic regularity.
While Brooks was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to
open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold
it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page
following. In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so
on down the class. Rumour went that our childlike professor declared
he had never known anything like it. Nearly every man got the perfect
mark. This was a fiction. The professor's idea was that we were old
enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish
negligence and tricks. If some men saw no use in botany, he would
not waste time in beating it into them. He left the blind and the
sluggards in their wilful ignorance, but had generously helpful hands
for all wiser ones who saw the value of trimming their lamps. All such
he would take to his garden personally to direct and inspire, and
our better men felt all through their lives how much that meant. In
general we soon came to feel and appreciate a most kindly influence
as proceeding from him. I think we had no teacher whom we at the last
regarded more affectionately or approached more closely; and many an
indolent one was won to warm interest and diligence.
Those were the days when the older science was rocking to its
foundations in a re-shaping at the hands of new and brilliant men.
Faraday, we might have heard of, but Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the
rest, were names all unknown, as were also the revolutionary ideas,
the conservation and correlation of forces, the substitution of
evolution in the scheme of the universe for the plan of special
creations. Here all unconsciously we were in contact with a man
who was in the thick of the new scientific movement, the friend and
partner in their strivings of the daring new interpreters of the
ways of God to men, and who was to have recognition as a specially
effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained
his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance
sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once
unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I
supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself
suddenly caught and wonderfully stimulated.
What [said Asa Gray] is the bright flame and vivid
heat that is set free on your hearth when you kindle
your piles of wood? It is the sunlight and sun-heat
of a century ago. The beams were caught in
the wilderness by the leaves of the trees; they were
absorbed and stored in the trunks, and the light
and heat day by day through many years was thus
heaped up. When now combustion begins, it is
simply a setting free of the radiance that was shed
upon the forest many years ago. The noons of a
time long past are making you comfortable in the
wintry storm of the present. So when the anthracite
glows in your grate, you feel the veritable
sunbeams that were emitted aeons upon aeons ago
upon the primeval world. It is the very light that
was drunk in by those most ancient forests. It was
held fast in the trunks, and when those faithful
reservoirs in their turn were crushed and commingled
and drenched until at last they lay under
the earth as the coal beds, they nevertheless held
fast this treasure. When you scratch your match
you but unlock the hoard, and the sunlight of
primeval days, diminished by no particle, glows and
warms once more.
This in substance was Asa Gray's introduction from which he went on
to explain that in the progress of the universe no faintest throb of
energy is lost. It might pass from form to form; heat might appear
as a mode of motion, of weight, of elasticity, but no smallest unit
perished. So the lecture flowed on into a luminous and comprehensive
exposition of the great doctrine of the conservation and correlation
of force. It was Asa Gray who brought us into touch with this new
science just then announcing itself to the world. He was a co-worker
and a compeer of the pioneers who at that moment were breaking a way
for it, and it was our privilege to sit at the feet of a master.
In later years his fame spread wide. He was recognised as the leader
in America in his special field, and in a class with the best men
of foreign lands. He was long a correspondent and special friend of
Darwin, to the spread of whose doctrines he rendered great service.
The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical
tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage
with the _odium theologicum_. The new science, it must be said,
perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing. Are Natural Selection
and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently
the workings of the "roaring-gloom that weaves for God the garment we
see him by"? But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way
Evolution and not Special Creations is the scheme of the world. Toward
this acceptance Asa Gray helped powerfully, a champion always bold,
humane, broad-minded. We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to
have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel.
In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting
from the clear upper sky.
A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much
wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Agassiz. He had come a few
years before from Europe, a man in his prime, of great fame. He was
strikingly handsome, with a dome-like head under flowing black locks,
large dark, mobile eyes set in features strong and comely, and with
a well-proportioned stalwart frame. At the moment his prestige was
greater, perhaps, than that of any other Harvard professor. His
knowledge seemed almost boundless. His glacial theory had put him
among the geological chiefs, and as to animated nature he had ordered
and systematised, from the lowest plant-forms up to the crown of
creation, the human being. Abroad we knew he was held to be an adept
in the most difficult fields and now in his new environment he was
pushing his investigations with passionate zeal. But the boys found in
him points on which a laugh could be hung. As he strode homeward from
his walks in the outer fields or marshes, we eyed him gingerly, for
who could tell what he might have in his pockets? Turtles, tadpoles,
snakes, any old monster might be there, and queer stories prevailed
of the menagerie which, hung up, and forgotten in the professor's
dressing-room, crept out and sought asylum in the beds, shoes, and
hats of the household. Before the resulting consternation, masculine
and feminine, he was always apologetic. He was on the friendliest
terms with things ill-reputed, even abhorrent, and could not
understand the qualms of the delicate. He was said to have held up
once, in all innocence, before a class of school-girls a wriggling
snake. The shrieks and confusion brought him to a sense of what he had
done. He apologised elaborately, the foreign peculiarity he never lost
running through his confusion. "Poor girls, I vill not do it again.
Next time I vill bring in a nice, clean leetle feesh." Agassiz took no
pleasure in shocking his class; on the contrary he was most anxious to
engage and hold them. So too, if his audience was made up from people
of the simplest. In fact, for each he exerted his powers as generously
as when addressing a company of savants. He always kindled as he
spoke, and with a marvellous magnetism communicated his glow to those
who listened. I have seen him stand before his class holding in his
hand the claw of a crustacean. In his earnestness it seemed to be for
him the centre of the creation, and he made us all share his belief.
Indeed, he convinced us. Running back from it in an almost infinite
series was the many-ordered life adhering at last and scarcely
distinguishable from the inorganic matter to which it clung. Forward
from it again ran the series not less long and complicated which
fulfilled itself at last in the brain and soul of man. What he held in
his hand was a central link. His colour came and went, his eye danced
and his tones grew deep and tremulous, as he dwelt on the illimitable
chain of being. With a few strokes on the blackboard, he presented
graphically the most intricate variations. He felt the sublimity of
what he was contemplating, and we glowed with him from the contagion
of his fervour. I have never heard his equal as an expounder of the
deep things of nature. He gloried in the exercise of his power, though
hampered by poverty. "I have no time to make money," he cried. He
sought no title but that of teacher. To do anything else was only to
misuse his gift. In his desk he was an inspirer, but hardly more so
than in private talk. I recall walks we took with him to study natural
objects and especially the striated rocks, which, as he had detected,
bore plain evidence that the configuration of the region had been
shaped by glaciers. He was charmingly affable, encouraging our
questions, and unwearied in his demonstration. "Professor," I said
once, "you teach us that in creation things rise from high to higher
in the vast series until at last we come to man. Why stop with man?
why not conclude that as man surpasses what went before, so he in turn
will be surpassed and supplanted by a being still superior;--and so on
and on?" I well recall the solemnity of his face as he replied that
I was touching upon the deepest things, not to be dealt with in an
afternoon ramble. He would only say then that there could be nothing
higher than a man with his spirit.
Whether Agassiz was as broad-minded as he was high-minded may be
argued. The story ran that when the foundations of the Museum of
Comparative Zoölogy were going on in Divinity Avenue, a theological
professor encountering the scientist among the shadows the latter was
invading, courteously bade him welcome. He hoped the old Divinity Hall
would be a good neighbour to the pile rising opposite. "Yes," was the
bluff reply, "and I hope to see the time when it will be turned into
a dormitory for my scientific students." They were quickly spoken,
unmeditated words without intention of rudeness, but wrapped in his
specialty he was rather careless as to what he might shoulder out.
Again, we had in our company a delicate, nervous fellow who turned
out to be a spiritualistic medium, and who was soon subjected to an
investigation in which professors took part, which was certainly rough
and ready. Agassiz speedily came to the conclusion that the young
man was an impostor and deserved no mercy. Some of us felt that
the determination was hasty. There was a possibility of honest
self-deception; and then who could say that the mysteries had been
fathomed that involved the play of the psychic forces? Possibly a
calmer and more candid mood might have befitted the investigation.
At any rate in these later days such a mood has been maintained by
inquirers like William James and the Society for Psychical Research.
These are straws, but it is hardly a straw that when Darwinism emerged
upon the world, winning such speedy and almost universal adherence
among scientific men and revolutionising in general the thought of
the world as to the method of creation, Agassiz stood almost solitary
among authorities rejecting evolution and clinging to the doctrine of
a special calling into being of each species. His stand against the
new teaching was definite and bold, but can it be called broad-minded?
This is but the limitation that makes human a greatness which the
world regards with thorough and affectionate reverence. Fortunate
are those in whose memories live the voice and countenance of Louis
Agassiz.
Those whose privilege it was to know both father and son will be slow
to admit that the elder Agassiz was the greater man. Alexander (to
his intimates he was always, affectionately, Alex), was a teacher only
transiently, and I believe never before a class showed the enkindling
power which in the father was so marked a gift. His attainments,
however, were probably not less great, and it remains to be seen
whether his discoveries were not as epoch-making. He possessed,
moreover, a versatility which his father never showed (perhaps because
he never took time to show it), standing as a brilliant figure
among financiers and captains of industry. Finally, in a high sense,
Alexander was a philanthropist, and his benefactions were no more
munificent than they were wisely applied; for he watched well his
generous hand, guiding the flow into channels where it might most
effectually revive and enrich. While possibly in the case of the elder
Agassiz, the recognition of truth was sometimes unduly circumscribed,
that could never be said of Alexander. He was eminently broad-minded,
estimating with just candour whatever might be advanced in his own
field, and outside of his field, entering with sympathetic interest
into all that life might present.
I recall him first on a day soon after our entrance into college in
1851. A civic celebration was to take place in Boston, and the Harvard
students were to march in the procession. That day I first heard
_Fair Harvard_, sonorously rendered by the band at the head of
our column, as we formed on the Beacon Street mall before the State
House. A boy of sixteen, dressed in gray, came down the steps to
take his place in our class--a handsome fellow, brown-eyed, and
dark-haired, trimly built, and well-grown for his years. His face had
a foreign air, and when he spoke a peculiarity marked his speech. This
he never lost, but it was no imperfection. Rather it gave distinction
to his otherwise perfect English. In the years of our course, we met
daily. He was a good general scholar but with a preference from the
first for natural science and mathematics. He matured into handsome
manhood, and as an athlete was among the best. He was a master of the
oar, not dropping it on graduation, but long a familiar figure on the
Charles. Here incidentally he left upon the University a curious and
lasting mark. The crew one day were exercising bare-headed on the Back
Bay, when encountering stress of weather, Agassiz was sent up into
the city to find some proper head-gear. He presently returned with
a package of handkerchiefs of crimson, which so demonstrated their
convenience and played a part on so many famous occasions, that
crimson became the Harvard colour.
Alexander was soon absorbed in the whirl of life, and to what purpose
he worked I need not here detail. The story of the Calumet and Hecla
Company is a kind of commercial romance which the harshest critics
of American business life may read with pleasure. At the same time
Agassiz was only partially and transiently a business-man, returning
always with haste from the mine and the counting-room to the
protracted scientific researches in which his heart mainly lay. His
voyages in the interest of science were many and long. He studied
not so much the shores as the sea itself. Oceanographer is the term
perhaps by which he may best be designated. By deep sea soundings
he mapped the vast beds over which the waters roll and reached an
intimacy with the life of its most profound abysses. Sitting next him
at a class dinner, an affair of dress-suits, baked meats, and cigars
at the finish, I found his talk took one far away from the prose of
the thing. He was charming in conversation, and he set forth at length
his theory as to the work of the coral insects, formed after long
study of the barrier reefs and atolls of remote seas. His ideas were
subversive of those of Darwin, with whom he disputed the matter before
Darwin died. They are now well-known and I think accepted, though
unfortunately he died before setting them forth in due order. They are
revolutionary in their character as to the origin of formations that
enter largely into the crust of the earth. In this field he stood as
originator and chief. He gave me glimpses of the wonderful indeed,
as we cracked our almonds and sipped the sherbet, his rich voice and
slightly foreign accent running at my ear as we sat under the banquet
lights.
Though oceanography was his special field, his tastes and attainments
were comprehensive and he was a man of repute in many ways. He was a
trained and skilled engineer and mathematician, and an adept in the
most various branches of natural science. At another class dinner,
when I was so fortunate as to sit beside him, his interest in botany
came out as he spoke of the enjoyment he took in surveying from the
roof of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy the trees of Cambridge, the
masses of foliage here and there appearing from that point in special
beauty. I spoke of the paper just read by Francis Darwin, the son of
Charles, before the British Association, emphasising the idea that
the life of plants and animals differs not in kind but only in degree.
Plants may have memory, perhaps show passion, predatory instincts, or
rudimentary intelligence. The plant-world is therefore part and parcel
of animated nature. Agassiz announced with real fervour his adherence
to that belief and cited interesting facts in its support. Subtle
links binding plant and animal reveal themselves everywhere to
investigation. In evolution from the primeval monads, or whatever
starting-points there were, the fittest always survived as the
outpoured life flowed abundantly along the million lines of
development. There was a brotherhood between man and not only the
zoöphyte, but still further down, even with the ultimate cell in which
organisation can first be traced, only faintly distinguishable from
the azoic rock on which it hangs.
As he talked I thought of the ample spaces of his Museum where the
whole great scheme is made manifest to the eye, the structure of man,
then the slow gradation downward, the immense series of flowers and
plants counterfeited in glass continuing the line unbroken, down to
the ultimate lichen, all but part and parcel of the ledge to which it
clings.
My tastes were not in the direction of mathematics or natural science,
and it was not until our later years that we came into close touch. In
the hospice of the Grimsel, in the heart of the Alps, as I sat down
to dinner after a day of hard walking, I saw my classmate in a remote
part of the room with his wife and children and a group of Swiss
friends. I determined not to intrude, but as the dinner ended, coming
from his place he sought me out. "I heard your voice," he said, "and
knew you were here before I saw you." We chatted genially. That
day, he said, he had visited the site of his father's hut on the
Aar glacier, where the observations were made on which was based the
glacial theory. On that visit he had, as a small boy, been carried up
in a basket on the back of a guide. He had not been there since until
that day. He was that night in the environment into which he had been
born, and assumed toward me the attitude of a host making at home
a stranger guest. To my question as to how a transient passer like
myself could best see a great ice river, he replied, "Climb to-morrow
the Aeggisch-horn, and look down from there upon the Aletsch glacier.
You will have under your eye all the more interesting and important
phenomena relating to the matter." We parted next morning. I had
enjoyed a great privilege, for he was the man of all men to meet in
such a place,--a feeling deepened a day or two later, when I looked
down from the peak he had indicated upon this wide-stretching glacier
below.
As age drew on he mellowed well. Perhaps sympathy with men and things
outside his special walk was no stronger than in earlier years, but
it had readier expression. I heard from him this good story. President
Eliot was once showing about the university a multimillionaire and his
wife who had the good purpose to endow a great school of learning in
the West. Having made the survey, they stood in Memorial Hall, about
to say good-bye. "Well, Mr. Eliot," said the wife, "How much money
have you invested?" Mr. Eliot stated to her the estimated value of the
university assets. The lady turning to her husband, exclaimed, with a
touch of the feeling that money will buy everything, "Oh, husband,
we can do better than that." Said Mr. Eliot, with a wave of the hand
toward the ancient portraits on the walls: "Madame, we have one thing
which money cannot buy,--nearly three centuries of devotedness!" There
is fine appreciation of a precious possession in this remark. In other
ways Harvard may be surpassed. Other institutions may easily have more
money, more students. As able men may be in other faculties possibly
(I will admit even this) there may be elsewhere better football. But
that through eight generations there has been in the hearts of the
best men, a constant all-absorbing devotion to the institution, is
a thing for America unique, and which cannot be taken away. How
stimulating is this to a noble loyalty in these later generations!
The old college is a thing to be watchfully and tenderly shielded. As
Alexander told me the story, I felt in his manner and intonation that
the three centuries of devotedness had had great influence with him.
As John Harvard had been the first of the liberal givers, so he was
the last, and I suppose the greatest. The money value of his gifts
is very large, but who will put a value upon the labour, the
watchfulness, the expert guidance exercised by such a man, unrequited
and almost without intermission throughout a long life! His fine
nature, no doubt, prompted the consecration, but the old devotedness
spurred him to emulation of those who had gone before.
In 1909 I enjoyed through Agassiz a great pleasure. He invited me to
his house where I found gathered a company of his friends, many of
them men of eminence. He had just returned from his journey in East
Africa, during which he had penetrated far into the interior, studying
with his usual diligence the natural history of the regions. He
entertained us with an informal talk beautifully and profusely
illustrated by photographs. I have said that he did not possess, or at
any rate, never showed his father's power of kindling speech. So far
as I know he never addressed large popular audiences. Nevertheless to
a circle of scientific specialists, or people intelligent in a general
way, he could present a subject charmingly, in clear, calm, fluent
speech. On this occasion he was at his best, and it was a pleasure
indeed to have the marvels of that freshly-opened land described to
us by the man who of all men perhaps was best able to cope with the
story. I listened with delight and awe. He was an old man crowned with
the highest distinctions. I thought of the young handsome boy I had
seen coming down in his grey suit into the Beacon Street mall, while
the band played Fair Harvard. On the threshold I shook his hand and
looked into his dark, kindly eyes. I turned away in the darkness and
saw him no more.