(1807-1873)
[Footnote 15: Written in 1886, on the publication of "Louis
Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence." Reprinted, by permission
of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., from "The Scientific Papers
of Asa Gray."]
[Illustration: Louis Agassiz. [TN]]
There is no need to give an abstract of the contents of these
fascinating volumes, for everybody is reading them. Most are probably
wishing for more personal details, especially of the American life; but
the editorial work is so deftly and delicately done, and "the story of
an intellectual life marked by rare coherence and unity" is so well
arranged to tell itself and make its impression, that we may thankfully
accept what has been given us, though the desired "fulness of personal
narrative" be wanting.
Twelve years have passed since Agassiz was taken from us. Yet to some of
us it seems not very long ago that the already celebrated Swiss
naturalist came over, in the bloom of his manly beauty, to charm us with
his winning ways, and inspire us with his overflowing enthusiasm, as he
entered upon the American half of that career which has been so
beneficial to the interests of natural science. There are not many left
of those who attended those first Lowell Lectures in the autumn of
1846--perhaps all the more taking for the broken English in which they
were delivered--and who shared in the delight with which, in a
supplementary lecture, he more fluently addressed his audience in his
mother-tongue.
In these earliest lectures he sounded the note of which his last public
utterance was the dying cadence. For, as this biography rightly
intimates, his scientific life was singularly entire and homogeneous--if
not uninfluenced, yet quite unchanged, by the transitions which have
marked the period. In a small circle of naturalists, almost the first
that was assembled to greet him on his coming to this country, and of
which the writer is the sole survivor, when Agassiz was inquired of as
to his conception of "species," he sententiously replied: "A species is
a thought of the Creator." To this thoroughly theistic conception he
joined the scientific deduction which he had already been led to draw,
that the animal species of each geological age, or even stratum, were
different from those preceding and following, and also unconnected by
natural derivation. And his very last published works reiterated his
steadfast conviction that "there is no evidence of a direct descent of
later from earlier species in the geological succession of animals."
Indeed, so far as we know, he would not even admit that such "thoughts
of the Creator" as these might have been actualized in the natural
course of events. If he had accepted such a view, and if he had himself
apprehended and developed in his own way the now well-nigh assured
significance of some of his early and pregnant generalizations, the
history of the doctrine of development would have been different from
what it is, a different spirit and another name would have been
prominent in it, and Agassiz would not have passed away while fighting
what he felt to be--at least for the present--a losing battle. It is
possible that the "whirligig of time" may still "bring in his revenges,"
but not very probable.
Much to his credit, it may be said that a good share of Agassiz's
invincible aversion to evolution may be traced to the spirit in which
it was taken up by his early associate, Vogt, and, indeed, by most of
the German school then and since, which justly offended both his
scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of
the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or
agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless
confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend
Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both
devotedly attended the lectures of Schelling--then in his later
glory--and of Oken, whose "Natur-Philosophie" was then in the
ascendant. Although fascinated and inspired by Oken's _a priori_
biology (built upon morphological ideas which had not yet been
established, but had, in part, been rightly divined) the two young
naturalists were not carried away by it, probably because they were
such keen and conscientious observers, and were kept in close
communion with work-a-day nature. As Agassiz intimates, they had to
resist "the temptation to impose one's own ideas upon nature, to
explain her mysteries by brilliant theories rather than by patient
study of the facts as we find them," and that "overbearing confidence
in the abstract conceptions of the human mind as applied to the study
of nature; although, indeed," he adds, "the young naturalist of that
day who did not share in some degree the intellectual stimulus given
to scientific pursuits by physio-philosophy would have missed a part
of his training." That training was not lost upon Agassiz. Although
the adage in his last published article, "A physical fact is as sacred
as a moral principle," was well lived up to, yet ideal prepossessions
often had much to do with his marshalling of the facts.
Another professor at Munich, from whom Agassiz learned much, and had
nothing to unlearn, was the anatomist and physiologist Doellinger. He
published little, but he seems to have been the founder of modern
embryological investigation, and to have initiated his two famous
pupils, first Von Baer, and then Agassiz, into at least the rudiments of
the doctrine of the correspondence between the stages of the development
of the individual animal with that of its rank in the scale of being,
and the succession in geological time of the forms and types to which
the species belongs: a principle very fertile for scientific zooelogy in
the hands of both these naturalists, and one of the foundations of that
theory of evolution which the former, we believe, partially accepted,
and the other wholly rejected.
The botanical professor, the genial Von Martius, should also be
mentioned here. He found Agassiz a student, barely of age; he directly
made him an author, and an authority, in the subject of his
predilection. Dr. Spix, the zooelogical companion of Martius in Brazilian
exploration, died in 1826; the fishes of the collection were left
untouched. Martius recognized the genius of Agassiz, and offered him,
and indeed pressed him, to undertake their elaboration. Agassiz brought
out the first part of the quarto volume on the "Fishes of the Brazilian
Expedition of Spix and Martius" before he took his degree of doctor of
philosophy, and completed it before he proceeded to that of doctor in
medicine, in 1830. The work opened his way to fame, but brought no
money. Still, as Martius defrayed all the expenses, the net result
compared quite favorably with that of later publications. Moreover, out
of it possibly issued his own voyage to Brazil in later years, under
auspices such as his early patron never dreamed of.
This early work also made him known to Cuvier; so that, when he went to
Paris, a year afterward, to continue his medical and scientific
studies--the one, as he deemed, from necessity, the other from
choice--he was received as a fellow-savant; yet at first with a certain
reserve, probably no more than was natural in view of the relative age
and position of the two men; but Agassiz, writing to his sister, says:
"This extreme but formal politeness chills you instead of putting you at
your ease; it lacks cordiality, and, to tell the truth, I would gladly
go away if I were not held fast by the wealth of material of which I can
avail myself." But only a month later he writes--this time to his
uncle--that, while he was anxious lest he "might not be allowed to
examine, and still less to describe, the fossil fishes and their
skeletons in the Museum, ... knowing that Cuvier intended to write a
work on this subject," and might naturally wish to reserve the materials
for his own use; and when the young naturalist, as he showed his own
sketches and notes to the veteran, was faintly venturing to hope that,
on seeing his work so far advanced, he might perhaps be invited to share
in a joint publication, Cuvier relieved his anxiety and more than
fulfilled his half-formed desires.
"He desired his secretary to bring him a certain portfolio of drawings.
He showed me the contents: they were drawings of fossil fishes, and
notes which he had taken in the British Museum and elsewhere. After
looking it through with me, he said he had seen with satisfaction the
manner in which I had treated this subject; that I had, indeed,
anticipated him, since he had intended at some future time to do the
same thing; but that as I had given it so much attention, and had done
my work so well, he had decided to renounce his project, and to place at
my disposition all the materials he had collected and all the
preliminary notes he had taken."
Within three months Cuvier fell under a stroke of paralysis, and shortly
died. The day before the attack he had said to Agassiz, "Be careful, and
remember that work kills." We doubt if it often kills naturalists,
unless when, like Cuvier, they also become statesmen.
But to live and work, the naturalist must be fed. It was a perplexing
problem how possibly to remain a while longer in Paris, which was
essential to the carrying on of his work, and to find the means of
supplying his very simple wants. And here the most charming letters in
these volumes are, first, the one from his mother, full of tender
thoughtfulness, and making the first suggestion about Neuchatel and its
museum, as a place where the aspiring naturalist might secure something
more substantial than "brilliant hopes" to live upon; next, that from
Agassiz to his father, who begs to be told as much as he can be supposed
to understand of the nature of this work upon fossil fishes, which
called for so much time, labor, and expense; and, almost immediately,
Agassiz's letter to his parents, telling them that Humboldt had, quite
spontaneously and unexpectedly, relieved his present anxieties by a
credit of a thousand francs, to be increased, if necessary. Humboldt had
shown a friendly interest in him from the first, and had undertaken to
negotiate with Cotta, the publisher, in his behalf; but, becoming uneasy
by the delay, and feeling that "a man so laborious, so gifted, and so
deserving of affection ... should not be left in a position where lack
of serenity disturbs his power of work," he delicately pressed the
acceptance of this aid as a confidential transaction between two friends
of unequal age.
Indeed, the relations between the "two friends," one at that time
sixty-three, and the other twenty-five, were very beautiful, and so
continued, as the correspondence shows. Humboldt's letters (we wish
there were more of them) are particularly delightful, are full of wit
and wisdom, of almost paternal solicitude, and of excellent counsel. He
enjoins upon Agassiz to finish what he has in hand before taking up new
tasks (this is in 1837), not to spread his intellect over too many
subjects at once, nor to go on enlarging the works he had undertaken; he
predicts the pecuniary difficulties in which expansion would be sure to
land him, bewails the glacier investigations, and closes with "a touch
of fun, in order that my letter may seem a little less like preaching. A
thousand affectionate remembrances. No more ice, not much of
echinoderms, plenty of fish, recall of ambassadors _in partibus_, and
great severity toward booksellers, an infernal race, two or three of
which have been killed under me."
The ambassadors _in partibus_ were the artists Agassiz employed and sent
to England or elsewhere to draw fossil fishes for him in various
museums, at a cost which Humboldt knew would be embarrassing. The ice,
which he would have no more of, refers to the glacier researches upon
which Agassiz was entering with ardor, laying one of the solid
foundations of his fame. Curiously enough, both Humboldt and Von Buch,
with all their interest in Agassiz, were quite unable to comprehend the
importance of an inquiry which was directly in their line, and, indeed,
they scorned it; while the young naturalist, without training in physics
or geology, but with the insight of genius, at once developed the whole
idea of the glacial period, with its wonderful consequences, upon his
first inspection of the phenomena shown him by Charpentier in the valley
of the Rhone.
It is well that Humboldt's advice was not heeded in this regard.
Nevertheless he was a wise counsellor. He saw the danger into which his
young friend's enthusiasm and boundless appetite for work was likely to
lead him. For Agassiz it might be said, with a variation of the
well-known adage, that there was nothing he touched that he did not
aggrandize. Everything he laid hold of grew larger under his hand--grew
into a mountain threatening to overwhelm him, and would have overwhelmed
anyone whose powers were not proportionate to his aspirations.
Established at Neuchatel, and giving himself with ardor to the duties of
his professorship, it was surely enough if he could do the author's
share in the production of his great works on the fossil and the
fresh-water fishes, without assuming the responsibilities and cares of
publication as well, and even of a lithographic establishment which he
set up mainly for his own use. But he carried _pari passu_, or nearly
so, his work on fossil mollusca--a quarto volume with nearly a hundred
plates--his monographs of echinoderms, living and fossil, his
investigations of the embryological development of fishes, and that
laborious work, the "Nomenclator Zoologicus," with the "Bibliographia,"
later published in England by the Ray Society. Moreover, of scattered
papers, those of the Royal Society's Catalogue, which antedate his
arrival in this country, are more than threescore and ten. He had help,
indeed; but the more he had, the more he enlarged and diversified his
tasks; Humboldt's sound advice about his zooelogical undertakings being
no more heeded than his fulminations against the glacial theory.
In the midst of all this, Agassiz turned his glance upon the glaciers,
and the "local phenomenon" became at once a cosmic one. So far a happy
divination; but he seems to have believed quite to the last that, not
only the temperate zones, but whole intertropical continents--at least
the American--had been sheeted with ice. The narrative in the first
volume will give the general reader a vivid but insufficient conception
of the stupendous work upon which he so brilliantly labored for nearly a
decade of years.
_Coelum, non animum, mutant_ who come with such a spirit to a wider and,
scientifically, less developed continent. First as visitor, soon as
denizen, and at length as citizen of the American republic, Agassiz rose
with every occasion to larger and more various activities. What with the
Lowell Institute, the college in Charleston, S. C., and Cornell
University, in addition to Harvard, he may be said to have held three or
four professorships at once, none of them sinecures. He had not been two
months in the country before a staff of assistants was gathered around
him, and a marine zooelogical laboratory was in operation. The rude shed
on the shore, and the small wooden building at Cambridge, developed
under his hand into the Museum of Zooelogy--if not as we see it now, yet
into one of the foremost collections. Who can say what it would have
been if his plans and ideas had obtained full recognition, and
"expenditure" had seemed to the trustees, as it seemed to him, "the best
investment;" or if efficient filial aid, not then to be dreamed of, had
not given solid realization to the high paternal aspirations? In like
manner grew large under his hand the Brazilian exploration, so
generously provided for by a Boston citizen and fostered by an
enlightened emperor; and on a similar scale was planned, and partly
carried out, the "Contributions to the Natural History of the United
States," as the imperial quarto work was modestly entitled, which was
to be published "at the rate of one volume a year, each volume to
contain about three hundred pages and twenty plates," with simple
reliance upon a popular subscription; and so, indeed, of everything
which this large-minded man undertook.
While Agassiz thus was a magnanimous man, in the literal as well as the
accepted meaning of the word, he was also, as we have seen, a truly
fortunate one. Honorable assistance came to him at critical moments,
such as the delicate gift from Humboldt at Paris, which perhaps saved
him to science; such as the Wollaston prize from the Geological Society
in 1834, when he was struggling for the means of carrying on the "Fossil
Fishes." The remainder of the deficit of this undertaking he was able to
make up from his earliest earnings in America. For the rest, we all know
how almost everything he desired--and he wanted nothing except for
science--was cheerfully supplied to his hand by admiring givers. Those
who knew the man during the twenty-seven years of his American life, can
quite understand the contagious enthusiasm and confidence which he
evoked. The impression will in some degree be transmitted by these
pleasant and timely volumes, which should make the leading lines of the
life of Agassiz clear to the newer generation, and deepen them in the
memory of an older one.