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Overview
Charismatic and controversial Swiss immigrant Louis Agassiz took America by storm in the early nineteenth century, becoming a defining force in American science. Yet today, many don’t know the complex story behind this revolutionary figure.
At a young age, Agassiz—zoologist, glaciologist, and paleontologist—was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Boston, and he never left. An obsessive pioneer in field research, Agassiz enlisted the American public in a vast campaign to send him natural specimens, dead or alive, for his ingeniously conceived museum of comparative zoology. As an educator of enduring impact, he trained a generation of American scientists and science teachers, men and women alike—and entered into collaboration with his brilliant wife, Elizabeth, a science writer in her own right and first president of Radcliffe College. But there was a dark side to his reputation as well.
Biographer Christoph Irmscher reveals unflinching evidence of Agassiz’s racist impulses and shows how avidly Americans at the time looked to men of science to mediate race policy. He also explores Agassiz’s stubborn resistance to evolution, his battles with a student—renowned naturalist Henry James Clark—and how he became a source of endless bemusement for Charles Darwin and esteemed botanist Asa Gray. “A wonderful . . . biography,” both inspiring and cautionary, it is for anyone interested in the history of American ideas (The Christian Science Monitor).
“A model of what a talented and erudite literary scholar can do with a scientific subject.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547568928 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 26 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Agassiz at Rest
ON DECEMBER 6, 1873, a chilly Saturday morning, Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology and geology at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, left his house at 36 Quincy Street. Walking more slowly than usual, he paused frequently as he descended the broad granite steps. Professor Agassiz was tired. The night before, he had helped celebrate the fifty-first birthday of his wife, Elizabeth, in the company of family and friends. He had even smoked one of those delicious cigars the doctors had forbidden him. Regardless, he now had to check on his museum, as was his custom, even on weekends. Agassiz didn't have far to walk. As he was crossing Broadway and then Cambridge Street, he would have glanced briefly at the new building on his left, Memorial Hall, Harvard's "buttressed, cloistered, turreted" tribute to its Civil War dead, also a sign of the power and wealth of the institution at which Agassiz had taught for over twenty years. On Kirkland Street, Agassiz turned left. He was on Divinity Avenue now, named after Divinity Hall, the place where Harvard trained its young men for the ministry and where the Concord sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, now a good friend, had once told his fellow Americans to "acquaint" themselves "at first hand with Deity" and to "live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind."
Feel your call in throbs of desire and hope, Emerson had encouraged his audience then, and this is how Agassiz had lived his life too, always to the fullest. Agassiz wasn't like Henry Eustis, his dean, whose house he had just passed, a mediocre engineering professor who, befuddled by opium, had performed abysmally in the war and now stayed out of the limelight. A more cheerful sight was the plain, functional building on Agassiz's right, Zoological Hall, surely one of the first dorms for graduate students in the United States. Joel Asaph Allen, Agassiz's curator of birds, lived there, as did young William Brooks, who had become Agassiz's student just that summer. Not too long ago, Louis François de Pourtalès, a marine biologist and former student of vaguely aristocratic origins, had moved in too. He had followed Agassiz from Switzerland to the United States and, after working for the U.S. Coast Survey, a federal agency originally created to chart the entire coast of the United States, was now finally back with his old master.
But in his mind's eye, Agassiz had already entered his temple, the only church of which he was a member, his glorious, specimen-filled Museum of Comparative Zoology, the large brick building that was waiting for him at the end of Divinity Avenue. It towered over the nearly five acres of land Harvard had given the great Agassiz so that he could build this spectacular home for his continually expanding collections: fish from Brazil, shells from the Pacific coast, birds from the Isthmus of Panama, mammals from the Rockies, spiders from the Himalayas, and fossils from Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. New packages of specimens were arriving daily by train, mail, or personal messenger. Agassiz's empire extended throughout the North American continent — in his 1871 report to the museum's trustees he rendered thanks to the Union Pacific, Kansas, Denver, Hannibal & St. Joseph, Chicago Burlington & Quincy, and the Michigan Central railroads, as well as to Wells Fargo and Company and the American Merchants' Express Company — and far beyond, into every known corner of the globe. Agassiz's students, earnest young men who could produce a good drawing even while peering through a microscope, would describe and classify what they could, while his devoted female assistants would thoroughly clean, mount, and label the specimens. At any given moment, the place was bustling with activity, and Agassiz looked forward every day to being right in the middle of it all. This was his pleasure dome.
Agassiz had made this stroll — pleasant even on a damp New England winter day — so many times that he knew every inch of the way, each one of the maples lining the streets. There were no sidewalks in that part of the city yet, but Agassiz, never a natty dresser, bravely stepped where he had to. Passers-by, if there were any that Saturday morning, would have recognized "the Prof" (as he was known) instantly: the robust, square body of the epicure, the massive head perched atop the broad shoulders, the long hair under the soft hat, the small, quick feet. Above average in height, Agassiz, a capable swimmer and mountain climber when he was young, looked strong even from a distance. Now in his sixties, he was still a "capital pedestrian," in the words of one of his biographers. Like the German poet Goethe, whom he admired, he never used a cane, though he would occasionally be seen wielding an alpenstock. In Boston and Cambridge, he was a presence both exotic and familiar, ein Europäer, a European through and through, as the writer William Dean Howells once observed, but one who radiated contentment "with his position and environment in New England." A Harvard Divinity School student later remembered how he had run into Agassiz on a previous morning in Cambridge. The student was headed in the opposite direction when he noticed how some unearthly glow seemed to be illuminating an otherwise typically dreary New England day. Strangely, the light wasn't coming from the maple trees, "yellow with decay," but from the person he saw walking with determination toward him. He recognized Agassiz's round, pleasant face, unmistakable in its "diffused kindliness." Though Agassiz did not know the student personally, he gave him a pleasant nod, "for that was the way of Professor Agassiz." Everybody loved him, the student added, the educated people as well as the common folks, for there was "something Christ-like" in his devotion to the truth, "his unselfish desire that all should see as clearly as he saw it."
The student's rapt recollection reflects the glorification of Louis Agassiz that had taken place, at least in the minds of his American admirers, long before his death, to the considerable annoyance of those who would not agree that he had drunk the milk of Paradise. The issue was not merely Agassiz's resistance to Darwinism. The sheer expansiveness of Agassiz's desires, the way he presumed to contribute to all areas of scientific knowledge, made the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel denounce him "the most ingenious and active confidence man in the entire field of natural history." Ordinary people, though, didn't care. Agassiz remained a favorite with the farmers, whose tales of breeding cattle and horses keenly interested him, the fishermen, who traveled long distances to bring him their buckets with specimens for identification, and the children, who knew that he liked to carry strange and wonderful stuff in his pockets. With his boylike enthusiasm for the world around him, Agassiz had an intuitive grasp of things other adults simply didn't or couldn't see. "It very rarely happens," enthused Oliver Wendell Holmes, the physician and poet, "that the same person can take at once the largest and deepest scientific views and come down without apparent effort to the level of popular intelligence." His scientific detractors notwithstanding, Agassiz had gained the hearts of all Americans. "This is," Holmes told him, "what singularly fits you for our country." James T. Fields, Agassiz's publisher at Ticknor and Fields, liked to repeat the story of the farmer who showed up at his office to add something to an article by "Mr. Agashy" that had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly — not because he wanted to set him right, but because Agassiz had told him that his opinion mattered. Mr. Agassiz, said the farmer, was "a real good, queer man."
The air in Agassiz's museum — never fresh, thanks to the mingled smells of alcohol, rotting specimens, dust, and tobacco — perhaps seemed particularly thick, even stifling, that Saturday morning. His many admirers imagined Agassiz as constantly up and doing: opening boxes, touching specimens; measuring, labeling, and storing them; drawing a quick sketch on a piece of paper, looking over a shoulder of a student charged with an important task. Maybe he was peering at the bones of the pterodactyl he had acquired two months ago or at the spawning salmon that Spencer Fullerton Baird of the Smithsonian Institution had just sent him, carefully packed in ice and sawdust. Suddenly, though, Agassiz began to perspire "freely." (That is at least how a local newspaper, the Boston Advertiser, reported it the next day.) Soon after, he fell ill and had to be "carried to his home, about a quarter of a mile distant," not an easy task, since he was a big man. Back at his house on Quincy Street, "the Prof" collapsed. Agassiz wanted to do only one thing — sleep. He was never to get up again. His family rallied to his side: his American wife of twenty-three years, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Agassiz, a partner in life as well as in science, and the children from his first marriage, to Cecilie Braun — his son, Alexander, who had helped him run his museum over the past decade or so; his daughter Ida, married to the Boston banker Henry Lee Higginson; and his youngest child, Pauline, wife of the wealthy philanthropist Quincy Adams Shaw. Alexander's young wife, the beautiful Anna Russell, daughter of an old Boston Brahmin family, selflessly stepped in too and was constantly by her father-in-law's side, providing whatever relief she could. Agassiz's marriage to Elizabeth had opened the doors of blue-blood Boston to him and his children, and blue-blood Boston now rushed to help him.
Word was sent right away to Dr. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard in New York, one of the world's foremost neurologists, with a career even more expansive than his name and a well-earned reputation for helping celebrities when their health was in crisis. In 1858, for example, he had treated Charles Sumner after Preston Brooks had beaten him senseless on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Brown-Séquard commanded considerable star power himself, and public awe and interest followed his activities. After the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870–1871, Brown-Séquard had fled to the States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a few years, in a house with a garden where he could keep animals for his experiments. The easily impressed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reported that the French doctor owned a thousand guinea pigs, with which he did what he pleased, "having this or that nerve severed." Agassiz's family had consulted Brown- Séquard more than three years earlier, when the first signs of the current trouble had manifested themselves. In September 1869, Agassiz suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which sent him into what Longfellow called "a year's eclipse" and required that he spend part of the next year away from his museum in the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts, under his wife's constant care. It was then that Brown-Séquard, who suspected hypertension, recommended that Agassiz quit his cigar smoking, advice that apparently had been ignored.
While Brown-Séquard packed his bags, Agassiz's own local doctor, Morrill Wyman, rushed over to Quincy Street. The older brother of the great anatomist Jeffries Wyman, the thick-set Morrill was a familiar sight in the streets of Cambridge, a family physician of the old school who despised the "city doctors" and their constantly rising rates; he never charged more than three dollars a visit. Despite his folksiness, Wyman had retained a keen interest in medical research. Among his accomplishments were the development of a procedure, known as thoracentesis, to remove fluid from the pleural cavity and the discovery of the link between hay fever and ragweed, which helped many of his suffering contemporaries find relief in the pollen-free mountains of New Hampshire.
Agassiz was, as Wyman and Brown-Séquard noticed immediately, seriously ill. When, four days after his collapse, he still hadn't improved, worried friends and admirers congregated in front of his house. In fact, so many showed up that it became necessary to muffle the doorbell. Bulletins were displayed at the door of the Professor's residence so that visitors could get the latest update on his condition. "The anxiety is widespread," reported the New York Times. Stunned into speechlessness, Longfellow, one of Agassiz's closest friends, simply cut out an article about Agassiz's illness from the Boston Advertiser, pasted it on the back of a one-penny U.S. postal card, and mailed it to his friend George Washington Greene in Rhode Island. He stopped by the house every day but, since there didn't seem to be any good news, never dared go in.
Agassiz had lived his life on the public stage, and it seems fitting that frenzied media speculation would accompany its final act. Frequent newspaper bulletins worked up interest in his illness to a fever pitch. They also, only too accurately, conveyed the doctors' puzzlement, which alternately alarmed and comforted the public. The language the papers used to describe Agassiz the patient resembled the scientific vocabulary of Agassiz the scientist: "Though the brain is affected and greatly weakened, the difficulty, in its present development, is not of a nature to cause delirium or destroy consciousness, and during the whole period the mental faculties have not been affected." In other words, the physicians weren't really sure what was going on: "They did not say that the Professor will, if he does not die, live the remainder of his days a shattered incurable, (as some dispatches have intimated,) but, on the contrary, express their belief that his entire recovery is just possible." Such vague language didn't reassure James Fields. He wrote in his journal, "Agassiz is ... probably dying. What a different world it will be to us without him. Such a rich, expansive, loving nature."
Arguably, what was happening to the great Agassiz wasn't fair. Alexander von Humboldt, the hero of his youth, had lived to the ripe old age of ninety- five, and Agassiz, who never had any problems in the confidence department, thought that he should have more time left too. After the onset of his first neurological crisis, a few years earlier, he wrote to his assistant, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, in a letter filled with instructions, "As long as I breathe I mean to look after everything. It is in my nature never to give up." People who met Agassiz for the first time were usually struck by his energy and the sheer delight he took in life. Numerous photographic portraits, or cartes de visite, showed Agassiz visibly pleased with himself. In a particularly memorable salt-print photograph, he can be seen smiling broadly, radiating a satisfaction not often found in the subjects of early photography. Or we encounter him self-consciously imitating Napoleon Bonaparte, posing next to the same or a similar ornate chair visible in the earlier image and in front of a framed painting of the Arc de Triomphe. But even in those somewhat later images from the 1860s that feature Agassiz in a more pensive pose, the refinement of his features (as indicated, for example, by the wrinkles around his eyes) and signs of exhaustion (the puffiness under his eyes) are balanced by the powerful facial features: the prominent nose, his expansive forehead, the large ears. If Agassiz is not looking at the viewer, it appears to be because his remarkable mind is focused somewhere else.
Time had indeed been kind to Agassiz, where looks were concerned; he had aged gracefully. His hair might have become stringier, his sideburns whiter, and his entire body, thanks to decades of good living, rounder, but in the last image we have of him, taken by Antoine Sonrel, he looks more serene than ever. Though he is not overtly smiling here, his expression, as well as the faintly dimpled cheek, creates the sense that this man, despite his bouts with serious illness, constant financial struggles, and opposition even from close colleagues, has much to be happy about.
When he first came to the United States in 1846, at the age of thirty-nine, Agassiz quickly established a reputation as someone who knew how to live, and live well. Attuned to the pleasures of the body, the cigar-smoking, wine-quaffing Agassiz, who would seldom show up for breakfast before eleven o'clock, had a talent for savoir vivre that his newly acquired American friends, stifled by two centuries of religious repression, could only envy. In a sense, the Puritans were still around. Their doctrine, to be sure, was fading away, but, as Longfellow's brother-in-law, the bon vivant Tom Appleton, testified, "Alas! Their kitchen remains." The fun-loving Agassiz quickly became the center of the Saturday Club, that loose association of prominent New England Brahmins who met for dinner at the Parker Hotel — so much so that some of the members began to refer to the group as "Agassiz's Club." Longfellow and his wife especially cherished the ease and European grace Agassiz had brought to chilly Boston, where many suffered from a lack of "regular, nourishing" relationships with others.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Louis Agassiz"
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Copyright © 2013 Christoph Irmscher.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixIntroduction 1
AGASSIZ AT REST 9
THE ICE KING 41
HUMBOLDT’S GIFT 85
DARWIN’S BARNACLES, AGASSIZ’S JELLYFISH 121
MR. CLARK’S HEADACHE 168
A PINT OF INK 219
A DELICATE BALANCE 270
A GALÁPAGOS PICNIC 311
Epilogue 343
Acknowledgments 349
Chronology 353
Abbreviations and Notes 357
Select Bibliography 403
Index 417
What People are Saying About This
"Compelling biography...A masterful portrait illuminating the tangled human dynamics of science."
—Booklist, STARRED
"In Irmscher’s hands, Agassiz’s life and passions are embedded in the major intellectual ideas of his time…. The relationship between Agassiz and his second wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the first president of Radcliffe College, is also fascinating."
—Publishers Weekly
"Christoph Irmscher's elegant, beautifully written account does the essential task of setting the mysterious Agassiz in his full social and historical context, where we can both appreciate his gifts and see his flaws clearly. His portrayal of Elizabeth Agassiz and her contributions is brilliant, and his exploration of Agassiz's stagnation, as the world turned without him, is both rigorous and poignant. Through the prism of Agassiz's life, much of 19th-century culture gleams freshly."
—Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal
"A biography as exuberant as its brilliant but wrong-headed subject, the unforgettable forgotten celebrity scientist Louis Agassiz. Christoph Irmscher is in his element detailing the exploits of this larger-than-life anti-hero of the Age of Darwin, whose feats of discovery took him from the Swiss Alps to the Amazon jungle and made him Harvard’s reigning eminence for decades."
—Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters and Margaret Fuller
"Christoph Irmscher has brought to life an essential figure in the history of American science and culture. Irmscher's expertise and talent for vivid prose open a fascinating window onto the origins of American science as we know it."
—Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club
"A thoroughly satisfying biography…Irmscher makes a convincing case that this egotistical, often wrongheaded figure deserves his reputation as a founder and first great popularizer of American science."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Reading this book is a pleasure - the writing is engaging and witty, while always intellectually rewarding …. Irmscher's account of Agassiz's life reminds us always to examine our own preconceptions concerning the nature of reality and man's place in the universe."
—Tom Cronin, Professor of Biology, University of Maryland