It would be unnatural to have such an assemblage as this meet in the
Museum and Faculty Room of this University and yet have no public word
spoken in honor of a name which must be silently present to the minds
of all our visitors.
At some near future day, it is to be hoped some one of you who is well
acquainted with Agassiz's scientific career will discourse here
concerning it,--I could not now, even if I would, speak to you of that
of which you have far more intimate knowledge than I. On this social
occasion it has seemed that what Agassiz stood for in the way of
character and influence is the more fitting thing to commemorate, and
to that agreeable task I have been called. He made an impression that
was unrivalled. He left a sort of popular myth--the Agassiz legend, as
one might say--behind him in the air about us; and life comes kindlier
to all of us, we get more recognition from the world, because we call
ourselves naturalists,--and that was the class to which he also
belonged.
The secret of such an extraordinarily effective influence lay in the
equally extraordinary mixture of the animal and social gifts, the
intellectual powers, and the desires and passions of the man. From his
boyhood, he looked on the world as if it and he were made for each
other, and on the vast diversity of living things as if he were there
with authority to take mental possession of them all. His habit of
collecting began in childhood, and during his long life knew no bounds
save those that separate the things of Nature from those of human art.
Already in his student years, in spite of the most stringent poverty,
his whole scheme of existence was that of one predestined to greatness,
who takes that fact for granted, and stands forth immediately as a
scientific leader of men.
His passion for knowing living things was combined with a rapidity of
observation, and a capacity to recognize them again and remember
everything about them, which all his life it seemed an easy triumph and
delight for him to exercise, and which never allowed him to waste a
moment in doubts about the commensurability of his powers with his
tasks. If ever a person lived by faith, he did. When a boy of twenty,
with an allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars a year, he
maintained an artist attached to his employ, a custom which never
afterwards was departed from,--except when he maintained two or three.
He lectured from the very outset to all those who would hear him. "I
feel within myself the strength of a whole generation," he wrote to his
father at that time, and launched himself upon the publication of his
costly "Poissons Fossiles" with no clear vision of the quarter from
whence the payment might be expected to come.
At Neuchatel (where between the ages of twenty-five and thirty he
enjoyed a stipend that varied from four hundred to six hundred dollars)
he organized a regular academy of natural history, with its museum,
managing by one expedient or another to employ artists, secretaries,
and assistants, and to keep a lithographic and printing establishment
of his own employed with the work that he put forth. Fishes, fossil
and living, echinoderms and glaciers, transfigured themselves under his
hand, and at thirty he was already at the zenith of his reputation,
recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense,
one of those folio copies of mankind, like Linnaeus and Cuvier, who aim
at nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole of animated Nature.
His genius for classifying was simply marvellous; and, as his latest
biographer says, nowhere had a single person ever given so decisive an
impulse to natural history.
Such was the human being who on an October morning fifty years ago
disembarked at our port, bringing his hungry heart along with him, his
confidence in his destiny, and his imagination full of plans. The only
particular resource he was assured of was one course of Lowell
Lectures. But of one general resource he always was assured, having
always counted on it and never found it to fail,--and that was the good
will of every fellow-creature in whose presence he could find an
opportunity to describe his aims. His belief in these was so intense
and unqualified that he could not conceive of others not feeling the
furtherance of them to be a duty binding also upon them. _Velle non
discitur_, as Seneca says:--Strength of desire must be born with a man,
it can't be taught. And Agassiz came before one with such enthusiasm
glowing in his countenance,--such a persuasion radiating from his
person that his projects were the sole things really fit to interest
man as man,--that he was absolutely irresistible. He came, in Byron's
words, with victory beaming from his breast, and every one went down
before him, some yielding him money, some time, some specimens, and
some labor, but all contributing their applause and their godspeed.
And so, living among us from month to month and from year to year, with
no relation to prudence except his pertinacious violation of all her
usual laws, he on the whole achieved the compass of his desires,
studied the geology and fauna of a continent, trained a generation of
zoologists, founded one of the chief museums of the world, gave a new
impulse to scientific education in America, and died the idol of the
public, as well as of his circle of immediate pupils and friends.
The secret of it all was, that while his scientific ideals were an
integral part of his being, something that he never forgot or laid
aside, so that wherever he went he came forward as "the Professor," and
talked "shop" to every person, young or old, great or little, learned
or unlearned, with whom he was thrown, he was at the same time so
commanding a presence, so curious and inquiring, so responsive and
expansive, and so generous and reckless of himself and of his own, that
every one said immediately, "Here is no musty savant, but a man, a
great man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and
sin." He elevated the popular notion of what a student of Nature could
be. Since Benjamin Franklin, we had never had among us a person of
more popularly impressive type. He did not wait for students to come
to him; he made inquiry for promising youthful collectors, and when he
heard of one, he wrote, inviting and urging him to come. Thus there is
hardly one now of the American naturalists of my generation whom
Agassiz did not train. Nay, more; he said to every one that a year or
two of natural history, studied as he understood it, would give the
best training for any kind of mental work. Sometimes he was amusingly
_naïf_ in this regard, as when he offered to put his whole Museum at
the disposition of the Emperor of Brazil if he would but come and labor
there. And I well remember how certain officials of the Brazilian
empire smiled at the cordiality with which he pressed upon them a
similar invitation. But it had a great effect. Natural history must
indeed be a godlike pursuit, if such a man as this can so adore it,
people said; and the very definition and meaning of the word naturalist
underwent a favorable alteration in the common mind.
Certain sayings of Agassiz's, as the famous one that he "had no time
for making money," and his habit of naming his occupation simply as
that of "teacher," have caught the public fancy, and are permanent
benefactions. We all enjoy more consideration for the fact that he
manifested himself here thus before us in his day.
He was a splendid example of the temperament that looks forward and not
backward, and never wastes a moment in regrets for the irrevocable. I
had the privilege of admission to his society during the Thayer
expedition to Brazil. I well remember at night, as we all swung in our
hammocks in the fairy-like moonlight, on the deck of the steamer that
throbbed its way up the Amazon between the forests guarding the stream
on either side, how he turned and whispered, "James, are you awake?"
and continued, "_I_ cannot sleep; I am too happy; I keep thinking of
these glorious plans." The plans contemplated following the Amazon to
its headwaters, and penetrating the Andes in Peru. And yet, when he
arrived at the Peruvian frontier and learned that that country had
broken into revolution, that his letters to officials would be useless,
and that that part of the project must be given up, although he was
indeed bitterly chagrined and excited for part of an hour, when the
hour had passed over it seemed as if he had quite forgotten the
disappointment, so enthusiastically was he occupied already with the
new scheme substituted by his active mind.
Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching in our community was prompt
and decisive,--all the more so that it struck people's imagination by
its very excess. The good old way of committing printed abstractions
to memory seems never to have received such a shock as it encountered
at his hands. There is probably no public school teacher now in New
England who will not tell you how Agassiz used to lock a student up in
a room full of turtle shells, or lobster shells, or oyster shells,
without a book or word to help him, and not let him out till he had
discovered all the truths which the objects contained. Some found the
truths after weeks and months of lonely sorrow; others never found
them. Those who found them were already made into naturalists
thereby--the failures were blotted from the book of honor and of life.
"Go to Nature; take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for
yourself!"--these were the maxims which Agassiz preached wherever he
went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric. The extreme rigor of
his devotion to this concrete method of learning was the natural
consequence of his own peculiar type of intellect, in which the
capacity for abstraction and causal reasoning and tracing chains of
consequences from hypotheses was so much less developed than the genius
for acquaintance with vast volumes of detail, and for seizing upon
analogies and relations of the more proximate and concrete kind. While
on the Thayer expedition, I remember that I often put questions to him
about the facts of our new tropical habitat, but I doubt if he ever
answered one of these questions of mine outright. He always said:
"There, you see you have a definite problem; go and look and find the
answer for yourself." His severity in this line was a living rebuke to
all abstractionists and would-be biological philosophers. More than
once have I heard him quote with deep feeling the lines from Faust:
"Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie.
Und grun des Lebens goldner Baum."
The only man he really loved and had use for was the man who could
bring him facts. To see facts, not to argue or _raisonniren_, was what
life meant for him; and I think he often positively loathed the
ratiocinating type of mind. "Mr. Blank, you are _totally_ uneducated!"
I heard him once say to a student who propounded to him some glittering
theoretic generality. And on a similar occasion he gave an admonition
that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was
addressed. "Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you a bright young
man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then,
what they will say will be this: 'That X,--oh, yes, I know him; he used
to be a very bright young man!'" Happy is the conceited youth who at
the proper moment receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as
this from one who, in other respects, is a kind friend. We cannot all
escape from being abstractionists. I myself, for instance, have never
been able to escape; but the hours I spent with Agassiz so taught me
the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in
the light of the world's concrete fulness, that I have never been able
to forget it. Both kinds of mind have their place in the infinite
design, but there can be no question as to which kind lies the nearer
to the divine type of thinking.
Agassiz's view of Nature was saturated with simple religious feeling,
and for this deep but unconventional religiosity he found at Harvard
the most sympathetic possible environment. In the fifty years that
have sped since he arrived here our knowledge of Nature has penetrated
into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced. The causal
elements and not the totals are what we are now most passionately
concerned to understand; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the
stripped-out elements and forces occasionally appear to us to be. But
the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day,
from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in
Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of all
our analytic investigations, will get round again to that higher and
simpler way of looking at Nature. Meanwhile as we look back upon
Agassiz, there floats up a breath as of life's morning, that makes the
work seem young and fresh once more. May we all, and especially may
those younger members of our association who never knew him, give a
grateful thought to his memory as we wander through that Museum which
he founded, and through this University whose ideals he did so much to
elevate and define.
[1] Words spoken at the reception of the American Society of
Naturalists by the President and Fellows of Harvard College at
Cambridge, December 30, 1896. Printed in _Science_, N. S. V. 285.