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LOUIS AG AS S I Z 
 
 ALICE BACHE GOULD 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 
 MDCCCCI 
 
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 Copyright, /poo 
 Maynard ff Company 
 
 ( Incorporated} 
 
 
 
 BlOLOGr 
 Entered at Stationers' Hall LIBRARY 
 
 George H. Ellis, Boston 
 
The frontispiece is from a photograph 
 representing Agassiz in middle life, taken 
 by A. Sonrel (exact date unknown) , and 
 kindly furnished by Mrs. Agassiz. The 
 present engraving is by John Andrew & 
 Son, Boston. 
 
 M122921 
 
To 
 Q. H. 
 
 Parvum parvo. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 Lowell says of Agassiz that "a good 
 leash of mother-tongues had he. 7 ' Agassiz 
 indeed used French, German, and English 
 almost indifferently ; and his biographers 
 have used them almost equally. Everything 
 needed for this small volume has, however, 
 been reduced to a dead level of English. 
 
 It may be said as truly that Agassiz was 
 strongly conscious of two nationalities. A 
 short account of his life has already been 
 included in a series dealing with Eminent 
 Swiss : he is here presented as an Eminent 
 American; and he was truly both, and 
 found the two loyalties compatible. 
 
 The most valuable legacies of scientific 
 men are left to the whole world, with no 
 restraint of place and little of time. But 
 there are a few gifts which they leave, as 
 other men leave them, to one country or to 
 one community. And whatever in Agassiz^ s 
 gift teas necessarily thus restricted we find 
 to-day in America, not in Europe. In 
 
x PEEFACE 
 
 Cambridge stands Ms Museum; at twenty 
 places on our coasts are the summer schools 
 which have succeeded to his Penikese ; and 
 in the American world is the transmitted 
 enthusiasm which passes from teacher to 
 scholar, the fire that may light up a whole 
 generation which has forgotten the source 
 where it was Jcindled. Agassiz himself lies 
 buried in Mount Auburn ; and, if another 
 legacy may yet be named, his children have 
 been left to Massachusetts, and not to 
 Switzerland, as Boston and America have 
 grateful cause to Jcnow. 
 
 In order to avoid foot-notes on a small 
 page, many quotations scattered through this 
 volume have been left without any indication 
 of their source. Nine-tenths of them are 
 from Mrs. Agassiz' s Life of her husband. 
 A very liberal use (by permission) has been 
 made of Mrs. Agassiz'* admirable look and 
 easy translations. The present writer's 
 thanks to Mrs. Agassiz, who has moreover 
 read the narrative portions of this book 
 in proof, are very gratefully recorded. 
 
PEEFACE xi 
 
 It should be stated that Mrs. Agassiz in no 
 way authorises the interpretation of Agas- 
 siz'' s scientific creed, which will be found in 
 the only chapter which is not narrative. 
 Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. have 
 Jcindly permitted the reprinting of Longfel- 
 low's poem, u On the Fiftieth Anniversary 
 of Agassiz." 
 
 A. B. G. 
 
 BOSTON, Noyember, 1900. 
 
CHBOtfOLOGY. 
 
 1807 
 
 May 28. Jean Louis Bodolphe Agassiz 
 was born at Motier, Switzerland. 
 
 1817-24 
 At school in Bienne and in Lausanne. 
 
 1824-26 
 
 With his brother at the Medical School 
 in Ziirich. 
 
 1826 
 
 Entered the University of Heidelberg. 
 Met Alexander Braun and Karl Schim- 
 per. 
 
 1827 
 Migrated to the University of Munich. 
 
 1829 
 
 Took degree of Doctor of Bhilosophy, 
 and edited Brazilian Fishes (in Latin). 
 
 1830 
 
 April. Took degree of Doctor of Medi- 
 cine. 
 
 Visited Vienna 5 returned to Munich. 
 December. Went home to Switzerland. 
 
xiv CHBONOLOGY 
 
 1831 
 
 At home in Switzerland. 
 December. Went to Paris. Met Cuvier 
 and Humboldt. 
 
 1832 
 
 Student in Paris. 
 
 February. Eeceived from Cuvier mate- 
 terial for his work on Fossil Fishes. 
 November. Went to Neuchatel as pro- 
 fessor in the College. 
 December. Declined call to Heidelberg. 
 
 1833 
 Purchase of his collection for the city of 
 
 Began publication of Fossil Fishes. 
 October. Married C6cile Braun. 
 
 1834-5 
 First and second visits to England. 
 
 1836 ' 
 Declined call to Geneva. 
 
 1837 
 
 Addressed Helvetic Society on a Glacial 
 Period. 
 
CHKCXNTOLOGY xv 
 
 1838 
 Declined call to Lausanne. 
 
 1840 
 
 Published Studies of the Glaciers, in 
 French (later in German). 
 H6tel des Neuch&telois established on 
 the glacier of the Aar. 
 Third visit to England; appeared as 
 advocate of an Ice Age. 
 
 1843 
 Completed Fossil Fishes. 
 
 1844 
 
 Published " Monograph on Fishes of the 
 Old Bed Sandstone/' as appendix to 
 Fossil Fishes. 
 
 1845 
 
 Published Anatomy of the Salmonidae (in 
 French) as part of the Freshwater Fishes. 
 
 1846 
 
 March. Left Neuch&tel. 
 Published Catalogue of Uchinoderms (in 
 French) ; Index to Zoological Names' (in 
 Latin) ; finished work on Bibliography 
 of Zoology (in Latin). 
 
xvi CHBONOLOGY 
 
 1846 
 
 Visited England for fourth time. 
 September. Sailed for America. 
 December. Gave his first lectures in 
 Boston for the Lowell Institute. 
 
 1847 
 
 Published (in Europe) Glacial System 
 (in French). 
 
 1848 
 
 Eevolution in !N"euch&tel. 
 Foundation of Lawrence Scientific School 
 of Harvard University. 
 Accepted professorship at Harvard. 
 Published Principles of Zoology (with 
 Dr. A. A. Gould). 
 Expedition to Lake Superior. 
 His wife died in Carlsruhe. 
 
 1850 
 
 Married Elizabeth Cabot Gary. 
 Sent by Coast Survey to study Florida 
 reefs. 
 
 Became Professor at the Charleston 
 (S.C.) Medical College. 
 
CHEONOLOGY xvii 
 
 1852 
 
 Eeceived the Prix Cuvier for his Fossil 
 Fishes. 
 
 1853 
 Eesigned professorship at Charleston. 
 
 1854 
 Declined call to University of Zurich. 
 
 1855 
 
 Establishment of the Agassiz School for 
 Young Ladies (1855-63). 
 Prospectus issued for Contributions to the 
 Natural History of the United States. 
 
 1857 
 
 May 28. Celebration of fiftieth birthday. 
 Completion of Essay on Classification 
 (Vol. I. of Contributions'). 
 Declined call to Paris (as again in 1859 
 and 1861). 
 Published Vol. II. of Contributions. 
 
 1859 
 
 Corner-stone laid for the Museum of 
 Comparative Zoology. 
 Spent the summer in Europe. 
 
xviii CHEONOLOGY 
 
 1860 
 
 Dedication of the Museum. 
 Published Vol. III. of Contributions. 
 
 1861 
 
 Became a naturalised citizen of the 
 United States. 
 
 Eeceived the Copley Medal of the Eoyal 
 Society. 
 
 1862 
 
 Published Yol. IY. of Contributions (the 
 last volume which was completed). 
 
 1865-66 
 Expedition to Brazil. 
 
 1868 
 Became non-resident professor at Cornell. 
 
 1869 
 
 Spoke at Humboldt Centennial. 
 Suffered from an acute illness of the 
 brain. 
 
 1871-72 
 Yoyage of the Hassler. 
 
 1873 
 
 Summer school at Penikese. 
 December 14. Louis Agassiz died at 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
JEAN LOUIS RODOL?H& 
 AGASSIZ. 
 
 I. 
 
 JEAN Louis EODOLPHE AGASSIZ was 
 born at Motier in 1807. His father was 
 pastor of the little Swiss village on the 
 Lake of Mor&t, and was also a teacher of 
 marked ability, so that the passionate 
 love of teaching which always distin- 
 guished Louis Agassiz may have been in 
 some sort an inheritance. The enthusi- 
 asm both for work and for play which 
 was so marked in the man was marked 
 also in the child. From his early child- 
 hood the boy delighted in birds and 
 beasts, fishes and insects, first in the way 
 of an equal and intimate friend and then 
 of a budding naturalist. He was always 
 tramping the fields and scouring the 
 banks of the lake in search of new creat- 
 ures 5 and he has left it on record that 
 the only punishment he remembers re- 
 ceiving from his father was in conse- 
 
2 LOUTS AGASSIZ 
 
 quence of his going fishing in an unsafe 
 boat. Apparently nothing followed on 
 the day when he led his little brother 
 to skate across the Lake of Mor&t, on ice 
 which was anything but safe, and when 
 Mme. Agassiz, looking anxiously from 
 the parsonage window to see what had 
 become of the children, caught sight of 
 them through her telescope at the criti- 
 cal moment when Louis was bridging a 
 fissure with his own body, in order that 
 Auguste might creep across a crack too 
 wide for him to jump. This exploit, 
 and the expedition in the unsafe boat, 
 reassure a reader who might be fright- 
 ened by the eager plans for extra lessons 
 which the school-boy at Bienne laid be- 
 fore his parents, and which are accom- 
 panied by prayers for money to buy 
 grammars and geographies. He ends 
 his petition with : " I should like to stay 
 at Bienne till the month of July, and 
 afterward serve my apprenticeship in 
 commerce at Neueh&tel for a year and a 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 3 
 
 half. Then I should like to pass four 
 years at a university in Germany, and 
 finally finish my studies in Paris, where 
 I would stay about five years. Then, at 
 the age of twenty-five, I could begin to 
 write.'' 
 
 The apprenticeship in commerce dis- 
 appears from the future plans of the boy 
 and his parents alike, as it becomes evi- 
 dent that his passion for study is not a 
 passing taste. Many country-bred chil- 
 dren have pursued and petted and col- 
 lected without having anything come of 
 it; and so have many school-boys prickled 
 with delight over poetry and romance 
 who are content to spend their manhood 
 in chasing a sixpence from column to col- 
 umn. The parent, whose fourteen-year- 
 old son announces his intention of becom- 
 ing an author, is apt to ignore the an- 
 nouncement ; but M. and Mme. Agassiz 
 appear to have been thoroughly wise in 
 bringing up their brilliant son, and to 
 have changed their plans slowly but 
 
4 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 steadily as Ms mind developed. The 
 family profession on Mme. Agassiz's side 
 was that of medicine. Louis's grand- 
 father and uncle could probably assist 
 him in founding a practice ; and, as soon 
 as the boy's age and attainments made it 
 wise to trust the constancy of his scien- 
 tific tastes, his parents gave full consent 
 that he should study to become a physi- 
 cian. "With this in view, his school 
 course at Bienne was supplemented by 
 two years more at Lausanne ; and he was 
 then sent at seventeen years old to the 
 Medical School at Zurich. Here for the 
 first time he found scientific books 5 and 
 he and his brother Auguste used to copy 
 by hand the treatises on Natural His- 
 tory which they were much' too poor to 
 buy. 
 
 Agassiz himself said later that the 
 inability to buy books, which then 
 seemed so great a misfortune, may have 
 been a blessing in disguise, because it 
 saved him from dependence on written 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 5 
 
 authority. When at last he had access 
 to scientific books, he had already learned 
 that the thing itself was better worth 
 study than was its description ; and, 
 indeed, he knew the Swiss fishes so well 
 that he wondered to find so little in 
 print about those instincts, habits, atti- 
 tudes, and motions with which he was 
 familiar. Alexander Braun, later his 
 fellow-student at Heidelberg, wrote home 
 from there that Agassiz was familiar 
 with every beast, knew the birds from 
 far-off by their song, and could give a 
 name to every fish in the water. 
 
 In the spring of 1826, when nineteen 
 years old, Agassiz left Zurich for Heidel- 
 berg ; and here his true university life 
 began. He and his brother parted, 
 Auguste returning to the commercial 
 apprenticeship which the older brother 
 refused, and Louis going out to make 
 new friends, whose first friendship came 
 from an intellectual sympathy and from 
 like intellectual aims, not from blood re- 
 
6 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 lationship or old association. His letters 
 to Auguste have a delightful elder- 
 brotherly tone through all their frank 
 affection. With Auguste he can safely 
 allow himself the luxury of a lecture, 
 whether it be four pages on the elephant 
 of the Lena or a disquisition on the 
 rejected commercial career at Neuch&tel. 
 " I earnestly advise you to while away 
 your leisure hours with study," he 
 writes, when twenty years old, to his 
 brother of eighteen. "Read much, but 
 only good and useful books. . . . Ke- 
 member that statistical and political 
 knowledge alone distinguishes the true 
 merchant from the mere huckster in 
 coffee and candles. ... A merchant 
 familiar with the products of a country, 
 its resources, its commercial and political 
 relations with other countries, is much 
 less likely to enter into speculations 
 based on false ideas, and therefore of 
 doubtful issue. Write me about what 
 you are reading and about your plans 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 7 
 
 and projects, for I can hardly believe 
 that any one can live without forming 
 them : I ? at least, could not." 
 
II. 
 
 THE four years spent at Heidelberg 
 and Munich are among the most pictu- 
 resque in Agassiz's life. In his letters 
 and in those of his friend Alexander 
 Braun, we are fortunate enough to have 
 the impressions and hopes of the ambi- 
 tious young fellows and the very spirit 
 of the place and time fixed forever. E"o 
 narrative can paint as vividly as these 
 unconscious letters. It was a true Ger- 
 man student life, with its migrations 
 from university to university, its vaca- 
 tion tramps, its ardent intellectual en- 
 thusiasms, not without the obbligato ac- 
 companiment of clinking rapiers and 
 beer-mugs. Duels and love-making are 
 dimly guessed through the cloud of 
 tobacco smoke "so tpiick you might 
 have cut it with a knife ?? that floats 
 about the three brilliant companions, 
 Braun, Schiinper, and Agassiz, whose 
 room at Munich was known as "The 
 Little Academy." 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 9 
 
 Life at the university marks Agassiz's 
 entrance upon an intellectual citizen- 
 ship, and the beginning of his influence 
 on other men. The fervour of his 
 scientific friendships was doubtless con- 
 nected with his passionate love of teach- 
 ing, both being at root a love of sharing 
 intellectual pleasures. Most men want 
 intellectual exchange and sympathy 
 much oftener than they get it ; but 
 there is a power of getting what one 
 wants, an ability to stimulate mental re- 
 sponse and to charm the best out of each 
 companion, and this is the teacher's 
 gift much the same in its essence as 
 the gift of leadership in any kind. This 
 trait was one which Agassiz had in its 
 highest development. It was not only 
 to his equals, but to children and work- 
 ingmen that he loved to pour out his 
 ideas. What is so contagious as enjoy- 
 ment 1 ? What so inspiring as enthusi- 
 asm 1 ! His wife tells us that in later 
 life he would talk of glacial phenomena 
 
10 LOUIS AGASS1Z 
 
 to the driver of a country stage- coach 
 among the mountains or to some work- 
 man splitting rock at the roadside with 
 as much earnestness as if he had been 
 discussing problems with a brother ge- 
 ologist. He would take the common 
 fisherman into his scientific confidence, 
 telling him the intimate secrets of fish 
 structure or fish embryology till the man 
 in his turn grew enthusiastic, and began 
 to pour out information from the stores 
 of his own rough and untaught observa- 
 tion. 
 
 So it was, too, in Agassiz's youth. He 
 not only made friends everywhere, but 
 he made them on an intellectual basis 
 which would have pleased Emerson 
 himself 5 and then he poured out a 
 hearty affection and emotional wealth 
 that transformed the relation. Ear- 
 liest and strongest of his friendships, and 
 most important for his after-life, was 
 that with Alexander Braun, whose par- 
 ents' house at Carlsruhe soon was to 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 11 
 
 Agassiz as a second home, and whose sis- 
 ter C6cile afterward became Agassiz' s 
 wife. Tiedemann, the professor of anat- 
 omy at Heidelberg, l c who must have had 
 a quick eye for affinities in the moral as 
 well as in the physical world,' 7 had sep- 
 arately advised each of the young men 
 to seek the acquaintance of the other. 
 At the first anatomical lecture the two 
 students happened to sit together 5 and 
 each, observing the careful and intelli- 
 gent note-taking of the other, was con- 
 vinced that this must be the student who 
 had been recommended to him. Thus, 
 by a mutual impulse, when they rose 
 to go, each called the other by name. 
 Tiedemann' s little plot stood revealed, 
 and never was a match-maker more 
 brilliantly successful. It was an inti- 
 macy at first sight which lasted for life. 
 The two boys left the room together, 
 and from that moment their work was 
 carried on in concert. Karl Schimper, a 
 third young fellow of even greater abil- 
 
12 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 ity and even more catholic tastes, com- 
 pleted a triple alliance which was soon 
 known among the students as the "Clo- 
 verleaf." Two of its three members rose 
 to eminence and left human knowledge 
 other than they found it ; but Schimper 
 lacked the moral force to keep himself 
 in hand, and his life was but a series of 
 irreparable mistakes. 
 
 Agassiz's studentship at Heidelberg 
 lasted just a year, from May, 1826, to 
 May, 1827. He fell ill of a fever, and, 
 instead of returning for the summer se- 
 mester, was obliged to stay at home to 
 regain his strength in Switzerland. In 
 the mean time Braun made his plans to 
 exchange Heidelberg for the new Univer- 
 sity of Munich, and Agassiz agreed to 
 accompany him. The, Cloverleaf was 
 re-established in Munich ; for Schimper 
 soon followed the other two friends, 
 coming in answer to their earnest invi- 
 tation to live partly at their expense. 
 Complete community of goods, material 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 13 
 
 and intellectual, seems to have been the 
 rule; and there was no thought of the 
 tragic consequence which was to come 
 ten years later, when Schimper should 
 accuse first Braun and then Agassiz of 
 stealing his theories. Always petulant 
 and without self-control, Schimper was 
 incapable of carrying anything to a 
 finish 5 and he has left only a few scat- 
 tered botanical papers and two thin 
 volumes of poetry. But the expecta- 
 tions which his friends entertained of 
 him were boundless, and must have been 
 justified by his early brilliancy, though 
 the world has long since forgotten his 
 ineffectual fire. Braun, on the other 
 hand, if less world-famous than Agassiz, 
 is no less honoured among German bot- 
 anists. As late as 1864, Schimper wrote 
 that he was about to publish a botanical 
 work. Braun has indorsed the letter, 
 " May God grant it! " 
 
 After a hard day's work in hearing 
 lectures, the Cl overleaf three, along with 
 
14 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 a few other students, used by way of 
 recreation to turn and lecture to one 
 another. ' ' When our lectures are over, 
 we meet in the evening at Braun's room 
 or mine, with three or four intimate 
 acquaintances, and talk of scientific 
 matters, each one in his turn presenting 
 a subject which is first developed by him 
 and then discussed by all. These exer- 
 cises are very instructive. As my share, 
 I have begun to give a course of natural 
 history, or rather of pure zoology. Braun 
 talks to us of botany ; and another of our 
 company, Mahir, . . . teaches us mathe- 
 matics and physics in his turn. . . . 
 Schimper will be our professor pf philos- 
 ophy. Thus we shall form a little uni- 
 versity, instructing one another, and at 
 the same time learning what we teach 
 more thoroughly, because we shall be 
 obliged to demonstrate it. Each session 
 lasts two or three hours, during which 
 the professor in charge retails his mer- 
 chandise without aid of notes or book. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 15 
 
 You can imagine how useful this must be 
 in preparing us to speak in public and 
 with coherence. The experience is the 
 more important, since we all desire 
 nothing so much as sooner or later to 
 become professors in very truth, after 
 having played at professor in the 
 university. " 
 
 The change from Heidelberg to Mu- 
 nich worked very well. A far more 
 stimulating intellectual life awaited the 
 eager young fellows among the group of 
 distinguished professors whom Ludwig, 
 the art-loving Bavarian king, had gath- 
 ered for his new University of Munich. 
 We in America are accustomed to see 
 Minerva spring in full panoply from the 
 fertile brain of some millionaire, a 
 Danae rather than a Jove. But in the 
 older world it is rare to find a university 
 made in a day and successfully createcj 
 by fiat, and thus the brilliant opening 
 of the University of Munich has especial 
 interest. The names of Schelling and 
 
16 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 Oken are perhaps the most famous upon 
 its list of teachers, at least for the gen- 
 eral reader. Dollinger, Martius, Zuc- 
 carini, Schubert, Wagler, and many 
 others follow for the student of natural 
 science. "I cannot review my Munich 
 life without deep gratitude/' wrote 
 Agassiz himself, long afterward. "The 
 city teemed with resources for the stu- 
 dent in arts, letters, philosophy, and sci- 
 ence. It was distinguished at that time 
 for activity in public as well as in aca- 
 demic life. The king seemed liberal; 
 he was the friend of poets and artists, 
 and aimed at concentrating all the glo- 
 ries of Germany in his new university. 
 I thus enjoyed for a few years the ex- 
 ample of the most brilliant intellects and 
 that stimulus which is^ given by compe- 
 tition between men equally eminent in 
 different spheres of human knowledge. 
 Under such circumstances a man either 
 subsides into the position of a follower 
 in the ranks that gather around a mas- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 17 
 
 ter or lie aspires to be a master him- 
 self. 7 ' 
 
 In another place he writes of Mnnich 
 (we omit some portions) : "That uni- 
 versity had opened under the most 
 brilliant auspices. Almost every name 
 on the list of professors was also promi- 
 nent in some department of science or 
 literature. They were not men who 
 taught from text-books, or even read 
 lectures made from extracts of original 
 works. They were themselves original 
 investigators, daily contributing to the 
 sum of human knowledge. And they 
 were not only our teachers, but our 
 friends. The best spirit prevailed 
 among the professors and students. 
 We were often the companions of their 
 walks, often present at their discussions ; 
 and when we met for conversation or to 
 give lectures among ourselves, as we 
 constantly did, our professors were 
 often among our listeners, cheering and 
 stimulating us in all our efforts after in- 
 dependent research. 
 
18 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 "My room was our meeting-place, 
 bedroom, study, museum, library, lect- 
 ure-room, fencing-room, all in one. 
 Students and professors alike used to 
 call it the Little Academy. Here 
 Schimper and Braun for the first time 
 discussed the laws of phyllotaxis, that 
 marvellous rhythmical arrangement of 
 the leaves in plants. Among their lis- 
 teners were Professors Martius and Zuc- 
 carini ; and even Eobert Brown, while 
 in Munich, during a journey through 
 Germany, sought the acquaintance of 
 these young botanists. It was in our 
 Little Academy that Dollinger, the 
 great master in physiology and embry- 
 ology, . . . taught us the use of the 
 microscope in embryological investiga- 
 tion." Other students not of the 
 Cloverleaf were prominent in the Little 
 Academy ; and as for the subjects dis- 
 cussed, they ranged from the Anatomy 
 of the Lamper-eel to the Structure of the 
 Bavarian Alps ; and from the Natural 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 19 
 
 History of the Mind to the Reasons why 
 Comets have Tails. As various were 
 the specimens which adorned the room. 
 When a child, Agassiz must have bid 
 fair to choke up the little parsonage 
 with his collection of caterpillars and 
 cocoons ; and, in writing of his life in 
 Zurich, he makes passing mention of 
 "some forty birds flying about my study, 
 with no other home than a large pine- 
 tree in the corner. 7 ' At Munich it was 
 certainly the same. Braun speaks of 
 Agassiz 7 s little closet, "not for the use 
 of men, but devoted to such Lenten fare 
 as fish, otters, beavers, and birds. 77 
 "When I knock on the wall against 
 which stands the bed, then Agassiz 
 comes over : there is only a thin parti- 
 tion between us. He has a living-room 
 of irregular shape with a little bedroom 
 and an entry where his fishes are lodged. 
 While I am writing here, he sits on tie 
 other side attending to his fish, of which 
 he has already bought several hundred, 
 
20 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 and which are shut up in a wooden tub 
 with a cover, and in various big glass 
 jars. A live gudgeon with beautiful 
 stripes is wriggling in his wash-bowl, 
 and he has adorned his table with 
 monkeys. We stay together in his 
 room or mine by turns, so as not to 
 need heat in two rooms, and not to burn 
 twice as much for light. ? ' 
 
 The Little Academy could hold from 
 fifteen to twenty persons i i conven- 
 iently.' 7 The walls were white and 
 covered with diagrams, to which the 
 draughtsmen employed by Agassiz to 
 draw his fishes had added skeletons and 
 caricatures. Braun, Schimper, and Ag- 
 assiz alike brought home all the speci- 
 mens they could collect in their excur- 
 sions ; and such material' had to find a 
 place, whether on the bed or on the 
 floor. Books filled the chairs, so that no 
 visitor could sit down ; and sometimes 
 there was little room to stand or move 
 about. "In short, it was quite orig- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 21 
 
 inal," writes one of the draughtsmen, 
 who further sums up the effect as that of 
 "a perfect German student's room. 7 ' 
 U I was some time there before I could 
 discover the real names of his friends : 
 each had a nickname, Molluscus, Cy- 
 prinus, Bhubarb, etc." The unwonted 
 luxury of several windows and of a little 
 entrance-room for his collections seems 
 to have caused much remark, but it was 
 not for these striking features that Agas- 
 siz thought his lodging worth remem- 
 brance. " In that room I made all the 
 skeletons represented on the plates of 
 Wagler's Natural System of Eeptiles; 
 there I once received the great anato- 
 mist Meckel, sent to me by Dollinger to 
 examine my anatomical preparations, 
 and especially the many fish skeletons 
 I had made from fresh- water fishes." 
 Braun takes the same fact from another 
 point of view, and writes home : "Un-, 
 der Agassiz's new style of housekeeping, 
 the coffee is made in a machine which 
 
22 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 is devoted during the day to the soaking 
 of all sorts of creatures for skeletons, and 
 in the evening again to the brewing of 
 our tea." 
 
 These Munich students were, of course, 
 the picked men of a brilliant university; 
 but still they were not so different 
 from the others as to make them self- 
 conscious. Research was in the air : it 
 was like the passion for business among 
 older men in America. And so our 
 wonder at the abilities of Agassiz and 
 his companions shades into a wonder at 
 the intellectual level and assumption of 
 the twenty-year-old society in which 
 they found themselves. It seems at first 
 like a playing at naturalists : next we 
 are struck with surprise at the excellent 
 quality of the work dora, tried not by 
 any graded or conventionalised stand- 
 ards, but without handicap and by the 
 absolute standard of the grown-up world. 
 And most conspicuous of all is their 
 exceeding pleasure in all their efforts. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 23 
 
 The jollity of the Cloverleaf, the high 
 spirits and full living of its three mem- 
 bers, their vacations and their fencing- 
 bouts and their many pleasures, save 
 them from any possible imputation of 
 priggishness. Life was fuller to them 
 than to most; after the delight of an 
 opera there is all the interest of a dissec- 
 tion ; and the joy of a mountain climb is 
 enhanced by an opportunity to get your 
 companion's views on phyllotaxis and 
 so back to Munich in time for the lect- 
 ures on the Philosophy of Eevelation. 
 How fortunate that Agassiz's remittance 
 should come to hand just as Schimper 
 needed it ! How remarkably excellent 
 is the Bavarian beer ! How charming 
 is divine philosophy! The Cloverleaf 
 was gay enough, but its glee interfered 
 with its scholarship no more than hard 
 work spoiled its fun. Agassiz once chal- 
 lenged an entire student-corps to fight/ 
 one after the other, because of some slur 
 upon Switzerland ; but we should be 
 
24 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 surprised to hear that lie missed a lecture 
 in consequence. The enemy will kindly 
 consult the university schedule, when 
 making engagements. 
 
 The incurable optimism which buoyed 
 Agassiz through life was part of his 
 physical outfit. Such capacity for hap- 
 piness generally means capacity for 
 pain, but with Agassiz it really seems 
 as if one did not imply the other. He 
 is but the more picturesque for his pov- 
 erty, for which he took little thought 
 except when it interfered with scientific 
 ambitions. His life long, Agassiz could 
 not believe that those who worked un- 
 selfishly for the advancement of human 
 knowledge would not find their daily 
 bread in some way provided ; and his 
 of ten- quoted answer $0 a business offer 
 in his American days, "But, my dear 
 sir, I cannot spend my time in making 
 money ! 7 ? would have been given as 
 naturally when he had nothing as when 
 he was in comfort. During part of his 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 25 
 
 student life he lived for a few cents a 
 day, while his scanty allowance went for 
 the support of two artists whom he kept 
 busy drawing fishes, and for the help of 
 Schimper, who was even poorer, and to 
 whom daily meals during his university 
 residence presented a problem. 
 
 Working hours stretched from seven 
 in the morning to eight or nine at night, 
 but with constant intermissions and very 
 various sorts of occupation. " At seven 
 o'clock we go to the hospital, at eight to 
 the university, from nine to eleven gen- 
 erally to the Eoyal Library ; from twelve 
 to one are the lectures on Natural His- 
 tory from Oken ; between one and two 
 we go to some cafe or other for dinner ; 
 from two to three to the Botanic 
 Garden, where we have lectures from 
 Martius and Zuccarini in turn. At 
 three we go to the university and hear 
 Schubert on Natural History till four 
 o' clock, then Oken on the Philosophy of 
 Nature, and, lastly, Schelling on Philos- 
 ophy. Then we often feel tired. " 
 
26 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 This is Braun' s account. Agassiz's is 
 almost word for word the same, and 
 adds: "This is the course of my daily 
 life, with the single exception that some- 
 times Braun and I pass an evening with 
 some professor, discussing with all our 
 might and main subjects of which we 
 often know nothing. This does not, 
 however, lessen the animation of the 
 talk. ' ? And so again Braun : ' There is 
 a charming custom here of going to the 
 professors' houses on certain evenings. 
 It is all as informal as at a Kneipe ; and 
 the talk is on all imaginable things, both 
 in science and in every- day affairs. At 
 Martins' house they generally give us 
 tea 5 at Okeii's, beer ; and to every 
 man a pipe with his name written on 
 it. When all have their little white 
 pipes in their mouths, it is quite Dutch." 
 
 These boys seem to have the knack of 
 finding thirty-six hours instead of twen- 
 ty-four. One wonders whether nervous 
 prostration had then been invented. In 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 27 
 
 Heidelberg they had succeeded in get- 
 ting an extra course of lectures at seven 
 in the morning, and were often obliged 
 to pull their professor out of bed for the 
 purpose. The fact that they did so, as 
 Mrs. Agassiz remarks, shows at least 
 the friendly relation existing between 
 teacher and scholars. In Munich there 
 was no need for any extra courses : more 
 were already given than even the Clo- 
 verleaf could assimilate. Extra energy 
 could all be expended on the lectures of 
 the Little Academy, which enjoyed still 
 one more advantage in being directly 
 under Professor Dollinger's own rooms. 
 This made easy an informal intercourse 
 of better worth than even formal lect- 
 ures. 
 
 Curiously enough, in Agassiz 7 s pub- 
 lished letters there is little mention of 
 the philosopher Schelling, though Schell- 
 ing undoubtedly exerted a profound in- 
 fluence on Agassiz 's mode of thought. 
 Braun, on the other hand, is constantly 
 
28 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 bursting into enthusiasms like these, 
 "The real master of all is Schelling' 7 5 
 i ' Schelling is again lecturing gloriously ? ? ; 
 " One hour with Schelling is worth more 
 than everything one can hear at Heidel- 
 berg all put together. . . . His first lect- 
 ure on the value of philosophy, and the 
 need of it in natural science, in law, art, 
 religion, and politics, ought to have 
 been heard by all the world ; and, in- 
 deed, men of all sorts were present, as 
 well as the students, even some from the 
 Minister's Privy Council. The king 
 was expected, but did not come. I 
 have never heard a more beautiful and 
 a more artistic discourse than this open- 
 ing lecture. "When he had finished, 
 some one in the audience cried, 'Er 
 lebe hoch 7 ; and thereupon there were 
 three such ringing cheers that the whole 
 house shook." 
 
 Both Braun and Agassiz were under 
 strong home influences. The " sweet- 
 ness of the old Swiss manse " lingered 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 29 
 
 always around Agassiz, whose intimacy 
 with both father and mother is charm- 
 ing. "I have my evening service and 
 talk silently with you, believing that at 
 that hour you also do not forget your 
 Louis, who thinks always of you," he 
 writes from the university to his father ; 
 and the watchful solicitude of both 
 parents, with the high ideal of character 
 which they always take for granted as 
 both his and theirs, should melt any 
 reader. But, though their sympathy 
 was constant and intelligent, they had 
 little or no technical understanding of 
 his work. For Braun, on the other 
 hand, all the influences at home made 
 as distinctly toward research as did any- 
 thing at Munich. His father's profes- 
 sion, indeed, was not scientific he was 
 postmaster-general of the Duchy of 
 Baden but the elder Braun was more 
 than an amateur. He owned some valu- 
 able collections, especially in mineral- 
 ogy ; and one whole wing of his house 
 
30 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 in Carlsruhe was given up to laborato- 
 ries and other rooms for his sons and their 
 university friends. The situation of the 
 house was beautiful; and the domestic 
 life within it was affectionate, cheerful, 
 and pious. A pleasanter place to pass 
 a vacation could hardly be imagined; 
 and, as Switzerland was too far for 
 Agassiz's finances, he used to go to 
 Carlsruhe as a matter of course. There, 
 when the rush of term time was over, he 
 could work in comparative leisure. 
 
 A letter from another of the student 
 guests says : ' ( Braun' s sisters are simple, 
 quiet girls, without any airs. Both are 
 much interested in natural history, es- 
 pecially as is proper for young ladies 
 in botany; the youngest also in but- 
 terflies." This ladylike curriculum 
 must afterward have been somewhat en- 
 larged. The elder sister, Cecile, was a 
 skilful artist 5 and both before and after 
 her marriage with Agassiz she gave him 
 valuable help in preparing sketches for 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 31 
 
 the lithographer. Braun had two sisters 
 and two intimate friends 5 the result was 
 exactly what might have been expected. 
 From choice as well as from economy 
 the young men used often to make part 
 of the journey to Carlsruhe on foot ; and 
 in several vacations they made further 
 expeditions to see such museums as were 
 within reach or to visit any scientific 
 men to whom they could get introduc- 
 tions, and to make themselves familiar 
 with the best private collections in their 
 part of Germany. Agassiz says that at 
 the end of his student life he knew every 
 animal, living and fossil, in the mu- 
 seums of Munich, Stuttgart, Tubingen, 
 Erlangen, Wiirzburg, Carlsruhe, and 
 Frankfort ; had travelled on foot all over 
 Southern Germany, and had explored 
 extensive tracts of the Alps. The Frank- 
 fort Museum had recently been greatly 
 enriched by foreign collections, and the 
 collector was shortly to go again to 
 Africa. Agassiz longed to accompany 
 
32 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 him, but longed in vain. There was one 
 pet plan of the Cloverleaf which re- 
 mained a mere castle in the air. All 
 three of the young men wanted to travel 
 in distant countries. Was not the world 
 the greatest of all museums, in which as 
 yet they knew only one room f 
 
 Humboldt's travels had fired all the 
 young naturalists of the day. Charles 
 Darwin as well as Agassiz speaks of read- 
 ing and re-reading Humboldt's Narra- 
 tive, and of the longings it aroused. But 
 Agassiz was not so fortunate as to find 
 any Beagle which would have him at a 
 gift, though he tried for at least three of 
 the scientific expeditions which were fit- 
 ting out while he was a student. His 
 preparations for the chance that never 
 came, skinning and pickling animals, 
 "even very large ones/' practising with 
 axe, hammer, and sabre, swimming, 
 making forced marches, keeping himself 
 always ready to start at a day's notice, 
 and finally "training a young friend as 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 33 
 
 travelling companion ' ' all this delight- 
 ful game at Robinson Crusoe was of no 
 avail. He solemnly obtained his par- 
 ents 7 consent, calling travel a step 
 toward a professorship. How it struck 
 his father at first we may see from part 
 of a letter : 
 
 "My dear Louis, . . . our gratifica- 
 tion lacks something. It would be more 
 complete, had you not a mania for 
 rushing full gallop into the future. I 
 have often reproved you for this, and 
 you would fare better, did you pay more 
 attention to my reproof. If it be an in- 
 curable malady with you, at all events 
 do not force your parents to share it. 
 If it be absolutely essential to your hap- 
 piness that you should break the ice of 
 the two poles in order to find the hairs 
 of a mammoth, or that you should dry 
 your shirt in the sun of the tropics, at 
 least wait till your trunk is packed and 
 your passports are signed before you 
 talk with us about it. Begin by reach- 
 
34 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 ing your first aim, a physician's and 
 surgeon's diploma. I will not for the 
 present hear of anything else." 
 
 But there was one short interval when 
 there seemed a real chance that Agassiz 
 might find the opening he sought. In 
 1829 Humboldt himself was starting for 
 the Ural and the Caspian ; and on one 
 happy evening, when the little white 
 pipes were out at Professor Oken's, 
 Oken promised to recommend the entire 
 Cloverleaf in case Humboldt should be 
 willing to enlarge his company. ' ' "With 
 this/ 7 Braun wrote, u we went home in 
 great glee. It was very late and a 
 bright moonlight night. Agassiz rolled 
 himself in the snow for joy ; and we 
 agreed that, however little hope there 
 might be of our joining the expedition, 
 still the fact that Humboldt would hear 
 of us in this way was worth something, 
 even if it were only that we might be 
 able to say to him one of these days, 
 * We are the fellows whose company you 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 35 
 
 rejected.' " But it was very little later 
 that Braun wrote liome again, announc- 
 ing what lie calls "our return from the 
 Ural Mountains. " 
 
 We have tried to make Agassiz paint 
 his own portrait; but we may add a 
 description given by Mr. Dinkel, the 
 draughtsman already quoted : "He was 
 at that time scarcely twenty years old, 
 and was already the most prominent 
 among the students at Munich. They 
 loved him, and had a high consideration 
 for him. I had seen him at the Swiss 
 students' club several times, and had 
 observed him among the jolly students. 
 He liked merry society, but he himself 
 was in general reserved and never noisy. 
 He picked out the gifted and highly 
 learned students, and would not waste 
 his time in ordinary conversation. 
 Often, when he saw a number of stu- 
 dents going off on some empty pleasure- 
 trip, he said to me : < There they go with 
 the other fellows: their motto is, Ich 
 
36 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 gehe mit den andern. I will go my own 
 way, Mr. Dinkel, and not alone: I 
 will be a leader of others.' ?? 
 
 And at twenty- one years old the boy 
 wrote to his father : "I wish it may be 
 said of Louis Agassiz that he was the 
 first naturalist of his time, a good citizen, 
 and a good son, beloved of those who 
 knew him. I feel within myself the 
 strength of a whole generation to work 
 toward this end, and I will reach it if 
 the means are not wanting. " 
 
III. 
 
 THESE impressionable university years 
 determined Agassiz's future life. He 
 went to Heidelberg with a strong taste 
 for natural history ; he left Munich de- 
 voted heart and soul to science, to give 
 his time and strength unreservedly to 
 her service until the end. What would 
 have happened, had he been constrained 
 to stay and try commercial life at Neu- 
 chAtel, we can hardly guess. 
 
 At Heidelberg the boy had made his 
 first scientific friendships. At Munich, 
 while still a student, he accomplished 
 his first scientific work, the editing of 
 the Brazilian Fishes, for which material 
 had been collected by Professor Spix. 
 Professors Spix and Martius had been 
 sent by the king of Bavaria on a scien- 
 tific journey to Brazil ; and the rich col- 
 lections which they had amassed in the 
 years 1817-21 had been brought back to 
 Munich, where the scientific results were 
 
38 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 slowly issuing from the press. Martins 
 liad the general charge of the botanical 
 and Spix of the zoological departments ; 
 but Spix's death in 1826 left unfinished 
 three zoological volumes, which were to 
 deal with shells, insects, and fishes re- 
 spectively. Martius, his surviving col- 
 league, who as professor had seen much 
 of the Cloverleaf, thought Louis Agassiz 
 quite competent to act as editor of the 
 volume on fishes, and offered him. the 
 work. It was such a chance as seldom 
 comes to a boy of twenty-one 5 but it 
 was a chance fairly earned by thorough 
 and eager labour, and opportunities are 
 among the things geniuses find and col- 
 lect. 
 
 Besides Agassiz' s delight in the thing 
 itself, he had another reason for grati- 
 tude. Such public recognition and such 
 a tangible result of his studies could not 
 but affect his parents in Switzerland, 
 whose attitude toward a purely scientific 
 career was still sceptical. They seem to 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 39 
 
 have entertained very conservative views 
 on the possibility of self-support for a 
 man of no profession except professor- 
 ship, although they never urged the 
 lack of practical, wage -measured utility 
 as a reproach against knowledge herself, 
 but only as an excellent reason why their 
 own particular penniless Louis should 
 have a bread-winning profession (like 
 that of medicine) as a preliminary. No- 
 where in their letters is there a sordid 
 ideal of success : they never overvalue 
 wealth or undervalue intellectual pleas- 
 ure, but they speak constantly of good 
 citizenship, and of the shame of depend- 
 ence on others. Louis was already be- 
 trothed to Cecile Braun, and he had no 
 dollar of income what was he to do ? 
 
 His passionate desire to give himself 
 wholly to science, his growing distaste 
 for the daily work of a physician, and 
 his pleading with his parents give us a 
 vivid and pathetic picture, our feelings 
 being saved by our knowledge of the 
 
40 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 happy chapters to follow. To all he can 
 say, they have but one answer : Let him 
 first take his medical degree, and then 
 discuss the next step. " He was perhaps 
 apt to think that the best medical teach- 
 ing would be found in connection with 
 the best zoological museum" ; and there 
 is a delightful passage in one of his later 
 letters to his father, when he already 
 wrote himself M.D. "I do not believe 
 it important that a young physician 
 should familiarise himself with a great 
 variety of curative methods," remarks 
 this hopeful young doctor, "so I try to 
 observe carefully the patient and his 
 disease, rather than to remember the 
 medicaments applied in special cases." 
 Agassiz wanted the appearance of his 
 book to be a surprise to his parents, and 
 he was much disappointed that the sur- 
 prise failed through his having neglected 
 to bind a friend to secrecy. In every- 
 thing else the plan was perfectly success- 
 ful. Praise of their son's brilliant abili- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 41 
 
 ties, of Ms perseverance, of the esteem in 
 which he was already held among scien- 
 tific men, this came to his parents in 
 one way and another. The wonderful 
 news of his forthcoming book was fol- 
 lowed shortly by the book itself, brave 
 with coloured plates and Latin descrip- 
 tions. Added to all this was the affec- 
 tionate obedience with which Louis 
 pressed on to the degree of Doctor of 
 Medicine. He took his degree brill- 
 iantly in 1830 ; and this, although he 
 had not only accomplished the work on 
 Brazilian Fishes in his student time, but 
 had also taken by the way the degree 
 of Doctor of Philosophy, which was a 
 desirable addition to his name on the 
 Brazilian title-page. The innocent ex- 
 ultation of son and parents, first over 
 the book and later over the diploma, is 
 best given in their own words: "Will 
 it not seem strange when the largest and 
 finest book in papa's library is one 
 written by his Louis 1 Will it not be as 
 
42 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 good as to see liis prescription at the 
 apothecary's 1 ?" "I hope yet to prove 
 to you that, with a brevet of Doctor as 
 a guarantee, Natural History may be a 
 man's bread-winner as well as the de- 
 light of his life." " I hasten, my dear 
 son, to announce the arrival of your 
 beautiful work which reached me on 
 Thursday, from Geneva. I have no 
 terms in which to express the pleasure 
 it has given me. . . . The old father 
 who waits for you with open heart and 
 arms sends you the most tender greet- 
 ing." His mother adds: "I cannot 
 thank you enough, my dear Louis, for 
 the happiness you have given me in 
 completing your medical examinations, 
 and thus securing to yourself a career 
 as safe as it is honourable. . . . You have 
 for my sake gone through a long and 
 arduous task. Were it in my power, I 
 would gladly reward you ; but I cannot 
 even say that I love you the more for it, 
 because that is impossible." 
 
IY. 
 
 AFTER the work on Brazilian Fishes 
 was finished, and the degrees were taken, 
 two years intervened before Agassiz ob- 
 tained his professorship. There was a 
 short visit to Vienna, a last semester at 
 Munich, nine months at home in Switzer- 
 land, and nearly a year in Paris. In 
 Vienna Agassiz found himself received 
 as a known scientific man for whom no 
 letters of recommendation were neces- 
 sary, and this surprised as much as it 
 pleased him. Some one called him Ich- 
 ihyologus primus saeculi, and he saved 
 the ponderous compliment to send home. 
 
 In the autumn of 1830 he left Munich 
 for good, and the Little Academy was 
 dismantled of all its trophies. Most of 
 these, indeed, had already been sent 
 home, with the suggestion that an uncle 
 "perhaps would have the kindness to let 
 some large shelves be put in the little 
 upper room . . . where, far from being 
 
44 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 an annoyance or causing any smell, my 
 collection, if placed under glass or dis- 
 posed of in some other suitable manner, 
 would be an ornament." Then for a 
 year at home he was wearying for inter- 
 course with his intellectual equals and 
 for access to the treasures of a university 
 or a great city. The effect that Agassiz 
 produced on those about him comes out 
 in the way his friends and relatives 
 urged their mites of contribution toward 
 sending their young author to Paris, 
 which was now the goal of his desire. 
 Enough money was raised to make it 
 possible, and from December, 1831, to 
 September, 1832, Agassiz was in Paris. 
 
 The two most interesting things in 
 this year are again his scientific friend- 
 ships. Cuvier, who ranked first among 
 living French zoologists, and Alexander 
 von Humboldt, the leader of all the sci- 
 entific world, were both in Paris } and 
 it seems to have needed little time to 
 gain affectionate recognition from both. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 45 
 
 They saw their own successor in the 
 eager and penniless young author, and 
 as charming and picturesque as the 
 equal friendship of the Cloverleaf are 
 the reverence and loyal affection of 
 Agassiz' s relation to these older men, 
 and his gratitude for the generous help 
 they offered him. It was an interesting 
 time, hardly two years after the famous 
 dispute between Cuvier and Geoffroy St. 
 Hilaire ; and the echoes of that discus- 
 sion were still sounding. Humboldt 
 used himself to attend one course of 
 Cuvier' s lectures, where Agassiz often 
 secured the seat beside him, and heard 
 his whispered comments on Cuvier's pas- 
 sionate advocacy of one set of doctrines. 
 But homesickness begins to show itself 
 very clearly in Agassiz' s letters home. 
 Alexander Braun was also in Paris 5 but, 
 as each advanced in his specialty, their 
 work could not be so much in common. 
 It is evident that Agassiz was somewhat 
 frightened in Paris by the bigness and 
 
46 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 coldness of the world and his own unim- 
 portance in it. In Munich he had been 
 a leader, but in Munich every one was 
 poor. In Paris there was wealth and 
 position even among scientific men, and 
 Agassiz's poverty was much more notice- 
 able. He had about forty dollars a 
 month ; a draughtsman was to him the 
 first of necessary expenses, and his work 
 had become such that only the museums 
 of a large city could supply the proper 
 collections of fossil fishes. He lived in 
 terror of being forced to give up work. 
 He had no presentable coat for evening 
 wear, and in writing home he confessed 
 that his delay in sending some book to 
 his brother meant that its price would 
 have left him absolutely penniless. 
 
 Now that he stands at the parting of 
 the ways between medicine and zoology, 
 his attempts to make science pay its own 
 expenses are interesting. The first step 
 was to find a professorship, but this 
 was by no means all. Teaching, how- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 47 
 
 ever delightful, was not all lie sought, 
 and investigations cost money in the 
 making and in the publishing too. 
 The Brazilian Fishes had introduced him 
 to a scientific publisher who might pos- 
 sibly be induced to purchase works 
 which were properly laid before him. 
 Agassiz's specialty was chosen he was 
 deeply interested in ichthyology and 
 for some years it had been his purpose 
 to write a work upon Fresh-water 
 Fishes. To this plan he had added a 
 still larger and more ambitious project. 
 This was the publication of a Natural 
 History of Fossil Fishes. Palaeontology 
 was then so new a science that the sys- 
 tematic treatment of extinct forms along 
 with living species had hardly begun. 
 The fossil specimens were scattered 
 through the museums of Europe, and 
 great expense would be necessary in trav- 
 elling and collating material. A more 
 sober judgment would have shrunk from 
 attempting the task; and the world may 
 
48 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 congratulate itself that Agassiz's youth 
 and genius conspired so often, first to 
 blind his judgment of probable results, 
 and then to bend the results themselves 
 aside from all probability. 
 
 Two incidents stand out from his Pa- 
 risian experiences, connected with two 
 generous gifts from Cuvier and Hum- 
 boldt, respectively. One was a wholly 
 unexpected gift of money, generously and 
 delicately offered by Humboldt, which 
 came at the very darkest hour, when it 
 had crossed even Agassiz's mind that he 
 might be forced by fear of absolute star- 
 vation to abandon museums, draughts- 
 men, teachers, and all, and go home to 
 live more cheaply as a physician or a 
 tutor in Switzerland. It was only two 
 hundred dollars, but ihe effect it pro- 
 duced was enormous. "My benefactor 
 and friend it is too much ! . . . My 
 parents will now readily consent that I 
 should devote myself entirely to science. ' 7 
 And then to his parents: "Oh! if my 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 49 
 
 mother would forget for one moment that 
 this is the celebrated M. de Humboldt, 
 and find courage to write him only a few 
 lines, how grateful I should be to her ! I 
 think it would come better from her than 
 from papa, who would do it more cor- 
 rectly, no doubt, but perhaps not quite 
 as I should like. Humboldt is so good, so 
 indulgent, that you should not hesitate, 
 dear mother.' 7 . . . 
 
 The other gift was of a different sort, 
 but of even greater generosity ; and it 
 was as thankfully and modestly re- 
 ceived. Cuvier had planned a work on 
 fishes in general, and had issued a circu- 
 lar asking for general help in collecting 
 his material. A year or two before, it 
 had been one of Agassiz's minor ambi- 
 tions to send so intelligently made a 
 collection of Swiss fishes as should 
 bring the contributor's name to Cuvier' s 
 notice. Now his hopes had gone fur- 
 ther, he had the ear of the master and 
 could ask advice for his own work. 
 
50 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 One evening at M. Cuvier's house the 
 only house where Agassiz dared go 
 without the evening dress which he 
 could not afford to own the old man 
 sent his secretary for the portfolio con- 
 taining all his notes and drawings of 
 fossil fish, and gave it unreservedly to 
 the student whom he had already made 
 free of his private library and working- 
 room. 
 
 The stay in Paris came to an end when 
 a chair of natural history was offered 
 Agassiz at Neuchatel. The salary guar- 
 anteed him was about four hundred dol- 
 lars ; but he had strong reason to hope 
 that his collections would be purchased 
 for the city. These collections had 
 reached a very considerable money value, 
 and were extremely awkward possessions 
 for a private person and a private house, 
 so that this advantage would more than 
 compensate him for a salary very small 
 even on Agassiz 7 s modest computation, 
 and perfectly absurd according to our 
 ideas to-day. 
 
V. 
 
 AGASSIZ'S life falls into three bold 
 divisions his youth and studentship, 
 his thirteen years as professor at Neu- 
 ch&tel, and his later manhood in Amer- 
 ica. He went to NeucMtel in the 
 autumn of 1832, and remained there 
 till 1845, declining calls to Heidelberg, 
 Geneva, and Lausanne, as afterwards in 
 America he declined invitations back 
 to Europe. The ease with which he 
 passed from one subject to another is a 
 curious contrast to this conservative 
 loyalty when once connected with an 
 institution. His greatest scientific work 
 as an investigator was done while at 
 NeucMtel. In America he occupied a 
 unique position as the undoubted scien- 
 tific leader of a continent, the " Great 
 Professor, " as we were fond of calling 
 him ; and his labours for the promotion 
 and popularisation of science were so 
 great that even his own researches are 
 somewhat overshadowed by them. 
 
52 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 Neuch&tel was at this time a Prussian 
 principality which had entered into the 
 Swiss Confederation. From the king of 
 of Prussia, through Humboldt as minister, 
 Agassiz more than once received gener- 
 ous assistance and encouragement. The 
 college was not an important one 5 and 
 the chair in natural history had been 
 founded in order that Agassiz might 
 occupy it; so that there was nothing 
 waiting him in the way of material 
 equipment. There was no scientific 
 apparatus, no museum, no proper lect- 
 ure-rooms ; but there was a home pride 
 in Agassiz, and a desire to meet his 
 wishes and to keep him in Neuch&tel, if 
 possible. 
 
 As a professor, his success was immedi- 
 ate. "He had, indeed, now entered 
 upon the occupation Vhich was to be 
 from youth to old age the delight of his 
 life. Teaching was a passion with him, 
 and his power over his pupils might be 
 measured by his own enthusiasm. " His 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 53 
 
 courses began by a very successful pub- 
 lic lecture on the Eelations between Dif- 
 ferent Branches of Natural History. This 
 was a characteristic choice of subject. 
 Agassiz was fond of ignoring arbitrary 
 divisions. " Facts in his hands fell into 
 their orderly relation as parts of a con- 
 nected whole, and were never presented 
 merely as special or isolated phenom- 
 ena." His influence was felt outside 
 the lecture-room in many ways. Popu- 
 lar lectures were offered for those who 
 were not students. Classes for children 
 sprang up. His collections formed the 
 nucleus of an unusually excellent city 
 museum. The Neuch&tel Society of Nat- 
 ural Sciences, organised within a month 
 of his arrival, was soon of real impor- 
 tance. Agassiz' s boundless and almost 
 incredible energy gave to the world 
 work after work on various subjects. 
 He attracted other men since famous on 
 their own account, and his establishment 
 was called a scientific factory always in 
 
54 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 full blast. Desor was Ms assistant at 
 Neuch&tel ; and Vogt, the laughter- 
 loving materialist, was also (so sarcastic 
 is fate) trained by Agassiz. Yogt may 
 really be said to exist in literature as 
 well as in science through his much- 
 refuted dictum that "the brain secretes 
 thought as the liver secretes bile. 7 ' The 
 number of Agassiz' s aids and pupils who 
 became naturalists of repute speaks for 
 itself, as does the number who chose to 
 follow him to America. Let us add that 
 the boy employed at Neuchatel to run 
 on errands and clean the boots became 
 a scientific man, and that, when Agassiz 
 left NeucMtel, the town, after having 
 been for thirteen years a centre of scien- 
 tific activity, relapsed at once into its 
 normal and placid uniinportance. 
 
 As for the vacations, three journeys 
 to England and many summers spent 
 among, on, and even in the Alpine 
 glaciers, give interesting reading. The 
 scientific and personal interest are al- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 55 
 
 ways intertwined, for with Agassiz his 
 work was his life, and everything smacks 
 of the investigator. His poverty is al- 
 ways conspicuous. He is continually 
 trying to earn something, but always 
 under a sort of protest at the disagree- 
 able necessity. But, where the end was 
 scientific, no expense staggered Louis 
 Agassiz. " These things are needed for 
 the work/' was a sufficient answer. His 
 first publisher having died, and the suc- 
 cessors hesitating to assume responsibility 
 for the Fossil Fishes, Agassiz decided to 
 publish at his own expense; and, as 
 plates could be more satisfactorily ex- 
 ecuted under his own eye, he promptly 
 founded and made himself responsible 
 for the maintenance of a lithographing 
 and printing establishment in Neuch&tel. 
 After this it is an anti- climax to refer to 
 the guides and scientific apparatus taken 
 to the glaciers or to the artists sent to 
 England to sketch fossil fishes. With a 
 yearly deficit distinctly larger than one's 
 
56 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 largest income, most professors would be 
 discouraged long before thirteen years 
 were up ; but Agassiz never was one to 
 be carked by cares. Where there is one 
 and only one chief object, there is at 
 least no wearing contest for the right of 
 way, and by so much is the man nearer 
 success. Whether he could afford it or 
 not, whether the money had been paid 
 or not, whether the deluge was coming 
 or not, the main object was accom- 
 plished. The apparatus was there, the 
 books were written, the lithographs were 
 given to the world 5 and other matters 
 were trifling in comparison. 
 
 The careless poverty which was so 
 picturesque in the student of Munich, 
 breakfasting off a glass of beer in order 
 to keep two draughtsmen busy among the 
 fishes who shared his bedroom, is per- 
 haps more open to criticism in the older 
 professor of NeucMtel, with a dignified 
 position to maintain, and a wife and 
 children besides. As soon as Agassiz 7 s 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 57 
 
 collections were bought and paid for, he 
 had married the sister of Alexander 
 Braun. A son and two daughters were 
 born to him ; and the son Alexander 
 afterward showed the same scientific 
 ability as his father and uncle. 
 
 "With Agassiz's more intimate personal 
 life at this time the public has little 
 concern. But there is one aspect of 
 private life which closely concerns any 
 biographer : we mean the way in which 
 private circumstances and personal char- 
 acter affect work which is properly 
 public. Agassiz's whole achievement 
 was coloured by his character. This 
 was first of all through the extraordinary 
 indifference to expense which we have 
 just remarked. In the next place, in 
 looking at a list of his publications, we 
 immediately notice how his works over- 
 lap one another. He generally pub- 
 lished in parts, doling his results out to 
 the public bit by bit ; and, if a new sub- 
 ject presented itself as needing investiga- 
 
58 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 tion, he would attack it without any 
 regard to how many irons he had al- 
 ready in the fire. Eegarding himself 
 always as a servant of Science, he put his 
 hand to whatever would serve her best 
 at the moment, declining new work 
 because it interfered with the old no 
 more than a man in public office would 
 decline to consider a public need on the 
 plea that his time is fully occupied 
 already. This resulted in a number of 
 incomplete works, and in an immense 
 number of short scientific papers on this 
 subject and that. 
 
 That such a method hurts a man's 
 own reputation is evident, but whether 
 his total service to science is lessened is 
 a matter for debate. And this seems to 
 explain the fact that so great a natural- 
 ist was not more grieved by unfinished 
 work. Agassiz was utterly without what 
 has been called the lust of finishing. It 
 was not that he lost interest in any sub- 
 ject under the sun, but that the over- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 59 
 
 whelming interest of something new 
 diverted him from his former pursuit, 
 to which he always expected to return. 
 And, as akin to this, we notice the 
 variety of his work and his readiness to 
 take up any new subject, without allow- 
 ing himself to be bound to his specialty. 
 Agassiz had a horror of intellectual red 
 tape, and a lively interest in everything 
 beneath the visiting moon. His work 
 on glaciers was wholly different from 
 the other things he had in hand, and 
 yet his name is as intimately associated 
 with the ice age as it is with fossil fishes. 
 Science is one, as he was fond of repeat- 
 ing ; yet he used to say also that no 
 investigator could afford to be without 
 a specialty, lest he miss a proper stand- 
 ard for exact and for comprehensive 
 knowledge. One subject, he said, should 
 be like a surveyor's arbitrary base line, 
 to which all other lines are referred for 
 comparison. 
 Next in the personal habits that af- 
 
60 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 fected his work comes the habit of 
 always working in partnership. This 
 was no accident, but a deep-seated trait 
 of character. As Lowell says of him, 
 "He basked and bourgeoned in copart- 
 nery" 5 and we have already remarked 
 that this fell in with his love of teaching. 
 Of an affectionate intellect, he was al- 
 ways the head of a troop of assistants, 
 sometimes paid and sometimes voluntary. 
 Money evidently seemed to Agassiz as 
 minor a question where another man 
 was concerned as he had always made 
 it for himself ; and this unstable busi- 
 ness basis became the source of serious 
 anxiety for him and deep dissatisfaction 
 for his fellow- workers. One embittered 
 assistant, who has sketched the scientific 
 factory at NeucMtel, remarks that the 
 arrangement between Agassiz and his 
 aids was that, if they needed money at a 
 time when he had any, he should give 
 them some, and that in any case several 
 of them were to be provided for at his 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 61 
 
 table. The opportunity that Agassiz 
 offered these young men was precisely 
 that which he himself would most have 
 longed for in his younger time, and he 
 interpreted other men's desires in the 
 light of his own character. What would 
 not he have given for such a chance to 
 do original work under the immediate 
 eye of a master, in constant partnership 
 with a celebrated investigator f 
 
YI. 
 
 OF the scientific writings which Ag- 
 assiz poured out from Neuchatel, the 
 greatest and most important was his im- 
 mense work on Fossil Fishes. From 
 1833 to 1843 this was issued, plates and 
 text not always keeping pace, and 
 monographs on special fauna following 
 as an appendix. It offered a wholly 
 new classification of fishes, making the 
 nature of their scales of prime impor- 
 tance, and thus facilitating the identifi- 
 cation of fossil fragments. Of course, 
 this in itself is only a minor aim ; but 
 Agassiz's fine " zoological tact" made 
 him recognise those differences which 
 accompany other differences through- 
 out the whole creature, and indicate the 
 really natural classification. How pro- 
 found was his knowledge of the subject 
 is illustrated by the anecdote of his 
 constructing from a single scale a fish 
 such as might belong to strata where no 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 63 
 
 fish, were then known. He was asked to 
 perform the feat at a meeting of the 
 British Association, without being told 
 that a fossil had been found. As he fin- 
 ished his drawing of what the fish must 
 have been, some one drew back a curtain 
 which had concealed the specimen ; and 
 a round of applause broke the decorum 
 of the meeting. 
 
 The generalisations which Agassiz 
 drew from his study of fishes made him, 
 in spite of himself, one of the greatest 
 contributors to the coming theory of 
 evolution by descent, "the "bete noire of 
 his later days." One of the greatest 
 gains of all modern science, the law that 
 the development of the individual animal 
 shows in brief the development of the 
 race, depends more upon Agassiz than 
 upon any other one worker. This law he 
 followed in detail, and proved beyond 
 question for the class of fishes 5 and this 
 he recognised as the greatest result of his 
 research. Long afterward he said: "I 
 
64 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 have devoted my whole life to the study 
 of Nature, and yet a single sentence may 
 express all that I have done. I have 
 shown that there is a correspondence 
 between the succession of fishes in geo- 
 logical times and the different stages of 
 their growth in the egg this is all." 
 To-day this is taken as due to inheri- 
 tance, and as one of the strongest rea- 
 sons for believing in the change of 
 species by descent. So, again, with 
 Agassiz's " synthetic or prophetic 
 types," uniting characteristics which 
 were afterward separated and confined 
 each to its own group as, for in- 
 stance, the early creatures, who were 
 half like the reptiles and half like the 
 fishes modern interpretation would, 
 of course, call these the ancestors of 
 both. To express the law of succession 
 and development of fishes during all 
 geologic epochs was his aim, as it is that 
 of every evolutionist 5 and in the modern 
 theory, Agassiz's results have become the 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 65 
 
 head of the corner, although for expla- 
 nation he passed directly, instead of in- 
 directly, to the Creator, declaring that 
 such laws were u incontestable proofe of 
 the existence of a superior intelligence, 
 whose power alone could have estab- 
 lished such an order of things. 77 
 
 The execution of the Fossil Fishes, es- 
 pecially the lithographing of the plates, 
 was of remarkable excellence. No ex- 
 pense had been spared, and the result 
 was accomplished. We have dwelt upon 
 this work because it was both the most 
 important and the most finished of his 
 books finished indeed as far as such 
 a thing could be finished, when every 
 year was producing new specimens, and 
 making Agassiz plan new appendices. 
 But this was only one of a score of im- 
 portant contributions to science. His 
 Fresh-water Fishes, issued in much the 
 same style, was kept in progress at 
 the same time ; and here the mon- 
 ograph on the Salmonidse stands com- 
 
66 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 plete. In the laboratory at NeuchAtel 
 were carried on some of the earliest 
 experiments in artificial fish-breeding 
 a subject which has now grown to vast 
 commercial importance. The fossil echi- 
 noderms of the Jura had not been ade- 
 quately treated ; and, therefore, Agassiz 
 could not resist writing an extensive 
 monograph on the subject, which soon 
 interested him in living echinoderms. 
 It occurred to him that the inner shape 
 of shells was very little known, and that 
 castings to give at least the outline of the 
 inhabitant would be of special value for 
 the extinct mollusks who have left us 
 shells and nothing else. No sooner was 
 it thought than done. Experiments on 
 metallic alloys which can -fill without 
 shattering, the preparation of shells to 
 act as moulds, and then the careful cast- 
 ing of models all were carried on under 
 Agassiz's eye and at his expense ; but in 
 this particular case there were actually 
 some pecuniary returns, as various mu- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 67 
 
 seums wished for a set of such models, 
 and were willing to pay for them. Had 
 any scientific man or museum professed 
 inability to pay, whether for models or 
 for books, Agassiz would have provided 
 what was wanted, as a matter of course. 
 Humboldt remonstrated on his lavish dis- 
 tribution of complimentary copies of his 
 books ; but it is always the same story. 
 Agassiz had one object: that was the 
 advancement of science. If he could 
 avoid falling bankrupt by the way, it 
 was of course more agreeable 5 but a 
 man must not think too constantly of 
 himself. 
 
 His unfortunate translation into French 
 and German of an English book on Con- 
 chology unfortunate because it appar- 
 ently did not occur to him that the 
 author regarded the thing as a money- 
 bringing investment stands almost 
 alone in that sort of work. Of a new 
 kind, again, are the Nomenclator Zoologicus 
 and the BibliograpJiia Zoologiae, an index 
 
68 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 of species and of writings, prepared be- 
 cause such lists were wanted, though 
 such compilation and work among books 
 instead of beasts was singularly out of 
 Agassiz's vein. The geology of the 
 Jura, too, and the construction of relief 
 maps of part of Switzerland, were sub- 
 jects pursued in the " scientific factory, " 
 though by Agassiz's assistants more than 
 by himself. But far more important 
 than any of this work except the Fossil 
 Fishes were the investigations which we 
 have left to the last those studies of 
 the glaciers which have given a whole 
 new chapter to the history of the earth. 
 
VII. 
 
 AGASSIZ'S great service to geology 
 proper (apart from palaeontology or 
 the study of fossils) is that thanks to 
 him and his coworkers ice has been 
 introduced as a great geologic agent, 
 almost as important as fire and water. 
 "The peasant had told his strange story 
 of boulders carried on the back of the 
 ice, of the alternate retreat and advance 
 of glaciers, now shrinking to narrower 
 limits, now plunging forward into ad- 
 joining fields by some unexplained 
 power. " The Alpine herdsman and the. 
 guide knew the moraines and dikes, the 
 polished or furrowed rocks of their own 
 valley 5 but educated men were not 
 familiar with these things, and did not 
 recognise them when the ice was not 
 there to draw attention to its own doings. 
 The idea that such phenomena were not 
 restricted to regions where glaciers now 
 are found, but that traces of glacial 
 
70 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 action could be seen over enormous 
 tracts of the earth 7 s surface, perhaps 
 including regions in the tropics, and that 
 in countries now temperate there might 
 be discovered not only the remains of 
 tropical fauna and flora, but also distinct 
 indications of a period of arctic cold 
 this was as new as startling. Geologists 
 looked at each other with a wild sur- 
 mise. The possibility had been glanced 
 at before, not by mere irresponsible 
 theorisers, but by such a master in 
 theoretical suggestion as Goethe. But 
 neither a lucky guess nor a learned 
 hypothesis can take rank in science with 
 a theory supported by accumulated evi- 
 dence from observation. 
 
 In 1836 Agassiz spent the summer 
 with his friend, Jean- de Charpentier, 
 and brought the daring of youth and 
 genius to help the strange, new ideas 
 that Charpentier hardly ventured to 
 suggest above a whisper. A new world 
 for research was flashed before his eyes. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 71 
 
 The boulders and scored rocks in the 
 valley of Bex were so many Eosetta 
 stones, and he took up the challenge of 
 Nature again without hesitation. The 
 fish might wait a little longer. If his 
 winters were given to them, he could 
 still put in his summers upon the glacier. 
 In 1837, when the Helvetic Society of 
 Natural History met at Neuch&tel, he 
 delivered the address on a glacial period, 
 which marks the admission of a new sub- 
 ject to general scientific attention. So 
 very great an innovation could not but 
 meet with a demand for very strong evi- 
 dence^ along with doubt, sometimes scorn- 
 ful, until years of research should accu- 
 mulate the evidence. Humboldt, much 
 as he respected Agassiz's judgment, was 
 sceptical. Yon Buch, the leading German 
 geologist, " raged," and invoked the 
 shade of De Saussure. " sancte De 
 8aussure, era pro nobis ! ? ? Caricature 
 was easy ; and there was plenty of it. 
 But Agassiz was supported by a firm 
 
72 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 conviction that he was on the right 
 track, and to-day the world acknowl- 
 edges that he was right and it was 
 wrong. 
 
 The six summers from 1838 to 1843 he 
 spent in the Alps, following far and wide 
 the hieroglyphics written by past gla- 
 ciers, and then turning his attention to 
 the constitution and action of glaciers as 
 they are to-day. A permanent station 
 was established on the glacier of the 
 Aar. A large, overhanging boulder of 
 the medial moraine just below the junc- 
 tion of two glaciers was transformed into 
 a rude hut, and christened the Hotel 
 des Neuch&telois ; and its name was soon 
 known throughout Europe. Here, in 
 cold and privation and -enthusiastic 
 happiness, Agassiz and his crew spent 
 their vacations. Long afterwards it was 
 a saying in Cambridge that no overcoat 
 was necessary when passing Agassiz' s 
 house, such a genial warmth of good 
 will glowed from its very windows. And 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 73 
 
 so it must have been in Switzerland, 
 where laughter and jollity, following on 
 science, are what travellers report from 
 the H6tel des Neuchatelois. Though of 
 world- wide reputation, the professor en- 
 joyed Alpine risk and adventure like 
 a boy. He was barely thirty when he 
 gave his first glacial discourse ; and he 
 wore his weight of learning lightly, like 
 a snowflake. It was not necessary for 
 glacial investigation that he should scale 
 the maiden peak of the Jungfrau 5 but 
 up it he went, and stood upon the two- 
 foot summit, balancing with his life in 
 his hand. Whether it had ever been 
 ascended before, is a question ; certainly, 
 it had not been attempted for many 
 years. 
 
 In the same summer he took a risk in 
 the opposite direction, and had himself 
 lowered deep into a crevasse, in order 
 to observe the v " banded," or "rib- 
 boned," structure of the glacier. That 
 he came back alive from this "descent 
 
74 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 into hell," as Ms horrified mother terms 
 it, is matter for surprise. He was so 
 absorbed in watching the structure of 
 the icy walk between which he was 
 gliding that he did not notice the 
 water beneath him until, at a depth of 
 one hundred and twenty-five feet, he 
 was suddenly plunged into an ice-cold 
 stream. His hasty signal being misun- 
 derstood at the surface, he was lowered 
 further and completely submerged. 
 Whether at that supreme moment he got 
 one last reading of the thermometer he 
 does not say, but that day he read no 
 more ; and the huge stalactites of ice 
 far above him, against which the rope 
 , was chafing, and the fall of a single one 
 of which would certainly crush the 
 intruder to death, dic^ cause some mo- 
 mentary anxiety even to the optimistic 
 Agassiz in his shivering upward flight. 
 
 Plans were made for a great glacial 
 treatise in three volumes, each volume 
 to be worked out in detail by one man. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 75 
 
 The erratic boulders which were scat- 
 tered over Switzerland were to be sorted, 
 mapped, traced back, every one, to the 
 quarry whence it came ; and the same 
 was to be attempted on a less complete 
 scale for other regions outside Switzer- 
 land. Agassiz's own volume was to be 
 a study of the glacier itself, as in action 
 to-day ; and many experiments on the 
 grinding, crawling mass were made with 
 boring - holes, coloured liquids intro- 
 duced into the ice, and rows of stakes 
 set across the glacier to show by their 
 deflection the rate of flow and place of 
 swiftest current in the unwieldy river, 
 whose complicated motions in its ir- 
 regular channel were often exactly op- 
 posed to expectation. But nothing ac- 
 complished on the physical side could 
 compare in importance with what was 
 ascertained on the historical side. Ag- 
 assiz could soon recognise traces of 
 glacial action as a hunter knows the 
 marks of his game. In his first visits to 
 
76 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 England in 1834 and 1835 he was re- 
 ceived as an ichthyologist ; but when he 
 went again, in 1840 and in 1846, it was 
 to find everywhere traces of extinct gla- 
 ciers, to explain in a word phenomena 
 that had puzzled everybody, and to con- 
 vince some of the English geologists out 
 of hand. The theory of an ice age grew : 
 the sheet of ice asserted to have passed 
 over some parts of Europe assumed more 
 and more startling dimensions, while 
 ridicule and opposition diminished in 
 inverse ratio. To-day no one doubts 
 the main facts : the explanation is yet 
 to be given. 
 
 So far as we know, Agassiz formed 
 no opinion about the possible causes of 
 a glacial period. It is one of those 
 large questions unencumbered by data 
 which invite irresponsible theorising. 
 Periodic changes in the elongation of 
 the earth's orbit or in the inclination of 
 its axis might cause a cosmic summer 
 and winter (in which case the ice age 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 77 
 
 will, of course, return), or there may 
 have been abrupt changes in the consti- 
 tution of the earth herself and a change 
 in the geographical situation of the 
 pole. Not much is known of the geol- 
 ogy of the arctic regions, and it is not 
 even absolutely sure whether the glacial 
 period was one of simultaneous cold 
 over the whole earth. Geologists are 
 not at one as to whether several distinct 
 periods or only one period with inter- 
 ruptions can be traced. Geologically 
 speaking, the time was extremely re- 
 cent it has been put within the exist- 
 ence of mankind. Such a sheet of ice 
 as that which covered the North Ameri- 
 can continent would distinctly alter the 
 level of the ocean ; and for this an 
 immense accumulation of snow is neces- 
 sary, while meteorology is still so far 
 from being an exact science that her 
 best men shrink from saying what 
 would be the effect of great changes in 
 the distribution of land and water, and 
 
78 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 of the mountain ranges against which 
 
 clouds discharge themselves. 
 
 To sum up, many causes have been 
 suggested which might have produced 
 unusual cold ; but whether any one of 
 them did so or did not is an unsolved 
 question. Geology, meteorology, and 
 astronomy alike are under examination. 
 
VIII. 
 
 IT was in 1842 that Agassiz began to 
 think of going to America, where he did 
 go four years later. He had hoped to 
 accompany the Prince of Canino (one 
 of several scientific men produced by the 
 house of Bonaparte) 5 but, as it turned 
 out, the prince was prevented, and 
 Agassiz went alone in 1846. The plan 
 had three aspects as finances progressed 
 from bad to worse. At first it was 
 a vacation scheme, at Agassiz' s own 
 expense and for his pleasure ; then the 
 prince offered to pay the expenses; and, 
 finally, it became a forlorn hope for the 
 raising of funds to discharge Agassiz 7 s 
 increasing debt. The time was not yet 
 when a celebrated man could gain a fort- 
 une in a summer by exhibiting himself 
 upon American platforms ; but still lect- 
 urers were better paid here than in 
 Europe, and Agassiz believed that he 
 might regain his pecuniary credit, with- 
 
80 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 out hurting his scientific work. We 
 note an occasion when his hopeful ex- 
 pectations were actually surpassed by 
 the event. The King of Prussia (always 
 through Humboldt) came to his help 
 again with a timely offer of some three 
 thousand dollars to be spent in travel 
 for scientific purposes ; and the Lowell 
 Institute, to which America has been 
 indebted for so many visits from eminent 
 men, never did a better thing than when 
 it brought Agassiz to Boston. 
 
 He promised to return to Neuch&tel 
 still, he speaks of preparation for "a 
 journey of several years' duration/* and 
 he spent his last winter in the unusual 
 task of finishing and setting in order 
 everything with which he was concerned. 
 The BiUiograpJiia and Nomendator upon 
 which he worked that last year seem like 
 the indices to a finished first volume of 
 his life. During some months at Paris 
 the JEchinoderms was put into final shape, 
 so that an assistant could attend to its 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 81 
 
 publication. His volume on the Glaciers 
 was already out, so that, although the 
 work was never finished, we find the par- 
 adoxical situation of Agassiz's part com- 
 plete, and that of his coadjutors wanting. 
 In spite of his repeating that he should 
 return to Neuchatel, it seems as if the 
 guiding genius of his life had warned 
 him that this was no mere episode. He 
 left his wife and children for the time 
 with Alexander Braun in Carlsruhe, but 
 he had not been long in America when 
 the news reached him of his wife's death. 
 The stars in their courses marked the 
 completion of a period; and in public 
 and private life alike, in intellect and in 
 affection, another life begins as his ship 
 passes across the ocean to a brave new 
 world. 
 
IX. 
 
 IN October, 1846, Agassiz arrived in 
 Boston, and at once sought out Mr. 
 John A. Lowell, trustee of the Institute 
 for which he was to give his first course 
 of lectures, entitled "The Plan of 
 Creation. " 
 
 "Never was Agassiz' s power as a 
 teacher or the charm of his personal 
 presence more evident than in his first 
 course of Lowell Lectures. He was 
 unfamiliar with the language. . . . He 
 would often have been painfully em- 
 barrassed but for his own simplicity of 
 character. Thinking only of his sub- 
 ject and never of himself, when a criti- 
 cal pause came, he patiently waited for 
 the missing word, and- rarely failed to 
 find a phrase which was expressive, if 
 not technically correct. . . . His foreign 
 accent rather added a charm to his 
 address ; and the pauses in which he 
 seemed to ask the forbearance of the 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 83 
 
 audience, while lie sought to translate 
 his thought for them, enlisted their 
 sympathy. Their courtesy never failed 
 him. . . . When his English was at fault, 
 he could nevertheless explain his mean- 
 ing by illustrations so graphic that the 
 spoken word was hardly missed. ... It 
 was always pleasant to watch the eifect 
 of his drawings on the audience. When 
 showing, for instance, the correspond- 
 ence of the articulate type, as a whole, 
 with the metamorphoses of the higher 
 insects, he would lead his listeners along 
 the successive phases of development, 
 talking as he drew and drawing as he 
 talked, till suddenly the winged creat- 
 ure stood declared upon the blackboard, 
 almost as if it had burst then and there 
 from the chrysalis, and the growing in- 
 terest of his hearers culminated in a 
 burst of delighted applause. " 
 
 Boston itself, the most belectured city 
 in the world, had never known a course 
 of lectures so suggestive and interesting. 
 
84 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 A second course on "Glaciers" was 
 promptly secured by private subscrip- 
 tion, and Agassiz then came into great 
 demand as a popular lecturer in all 
 the Eastern cities. Boston, New York, 
 Albany, Philadelphia, Charleston, are 
 only a few of the places where he was 
 heard. He always chose very broad 
 subjects for popular lectures, making 
 the untrained public free of great gen- 
 eralisations with such velvet ease that 
 only other scholars saw the iron scholar- 
 ship beneath and knew the volumes of 
 debate summed up in one judicious sen- 
 tence. By stripping away all superflu- 
 ous details, he made the central interest 
 show for itself, and could stimulate the 
 most sluggish minds to curiosity by 
 glimpses at all that was yet to be dis- 
 covered. 
 
 "Persuasion fondled in his look and 
 tone," 
 
 says the ode which we have already 
 quoted. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 85 
 
 "Then how the heat through every 
 
 fibre ran, 
 Felt in the gathering presence of the 
 
 man, 
 While the apt word and gesture came 
 
 unbid!" 
 
 It was his own unfeigned delight in 
 what he had to tell that carried captive 
 every meeting he addressed. 
 
 Several of Agassiz's fellow-workers 
 had either accompanied or followed him 
 to America, and in a short time he had 
 rallied friends enough to re-establish the 
 " scientific factory " in East Boston in- 
 stead of !N"euch4tel. Afterward its site 
 was changed to Cambridge. An atmos- 
 phere of enthusiasm, of happiness in 
 opportunity and delight in achievement, 
 enveloped Agassiz as much in one part of 
 the world as in another ; but, as for the 
 domestic details of this new Neuch&tel, 
 
 ' S 
 
 without one mollifying drop of woman's 
 influence, with no assuaging worldliness, 
 and no guardian to mix a little nitrogen 
 
86 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 with the ozone imagination gives it 
 up. Such feminine eye-witnesses as we 
 have consulted turn with a shiver from 
 the recollection ; and the more humor- 
 ous reminiscences which have found their 
 way into print present a confused pict- 
 ure of snapping turtles lurking under 
 the stairs, of a little fox and other sur- 
 prises in the garden, and of a general 
 need for wary walking. Agassiz's or- 
 derly arrangement of the animal king- 
 dom was certainly, in his own favourite 
 phrase, " ideal, not material.' 7 It is 
 said that a lady asked him at a dinner to 
 explain the difference between a frog and 
 a toad. The Great Professor, beaming 
 with pleasure at not being taken una- 
 wares, dived first into his right pocket 
 and then into his left, produced two 
 living specimens, and then and there 
 made the matter plain to her. Even 
 after his second marriage these habits 
 prevailed ; and one of the favourite 
 Cambridge anecdotes concerning him 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 87 
 
 tells of his wife's calling in terror 
 from her dressing-room, " There's a 
 snake in my shoe!" and of Agassiz' s 
 prompt answer, horrified in his turn, 
 "One snake ! but where zen are ze other 
 six?" 
 
 For several years there is mention, 
 growing less and less frequent, of his 
 expected return to Europe. Perhaps it 
 would have been hard for Agassiz him- 
 self to say just when he recognised that 
 he had given up returning, and had cast 
 in his lot, for better, for worse, with the 
 United States. One biographer evidently 
 thinks the determination was made at 
 first sight of Niagara Falls. In 1848 
 the wave of revolution which broke 
 against half the thrones of Europe swept 
 Neuch&tel away from Prussia, and 
 Agassiz was honourably discharged from 
 the royal service. Almost at the same 
 time the Lawrence Scientific School was 
 founded in Harvard University, and the 
 chair of zoology and geology was ac- 
 
88 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 cepted by Agassiz. His private life was 
 forming again in America. His son of 
 fourteen years came out to him in 1849, 
 and in 1850 Agassiz 's second marriage 
 (to Elizabeth* Cabot Gary) made him an 
 American at heart, and brought his 
 daughters to a new home in Cambridge. 
 His wife from the first affected his scien- 
 tific as well as his private life ; for she 
 was to him secretary and assistant, and 
 even collaborator. She kept the scien- 
 tific journal of his two expeditions to 
 South America, and since her husband's 
 death has crowned her labours in his 
 behalf by a Life of Agassiz which makes 
 others feel their writings an imperti- 
 nence. 
 
X. 
 
 BUSINESS and pleasure alike sent Ag- 
 assiz to travel over all the eastern half 
 of the United States. To all the princi- 
 pal cities he went as a lecturer. Early 
 in his stay he led a scientific expedition 
 to Lake Superior. In 1853 he passed 
 up the Mississippi from the Gulf to St. 
 Louis. For some years Charleston was 
 familiar to him, from his holding a 
 second professorship there in the Medi- 
 cal School. He knew well all the New 
 England states ; and, if all the gigantic 
 boulders to which the country folk have 
 given his name were gazetted, his paths 
 would stand recorded almost as well as 
 the course of one of his own glaciers. 
 The steamers of the Coast Survey carried 
 him from the coral reefs of Florida to the 
 ice-scored coasts of Maine. But, in spite, 
 of his additional professorship at Charles- 
 ton (later also at Cornell) and his in- 
 numerable engagements to lecture, he 
 
90 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 was always a Harvard professor ; and 
 in spite of his wanderings he stands 
 identified with Boston at the time when 
 Boston touched her highest mark. This 
 was the time of the famous Saturday 
 Club, when Agassiz, Emerson, Felton, 
 Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, Motley, 
 and their peers met round one table ; 
 when Bache and Henry were well-known 
 figures in Cambridge ; the time which 
 made Lowell, afterward a darling guest 
 of London,, look back across the ocean 
 from St. James's, and say that he 
 had never known such society as in 
 Boston and Cambridge. Neither before 
 nor since has Boston been so much of a 
 capital city. She was much smaller 
 then than now, and her average man 
 stood higher. Public life was still in 
 good odour. Her merchants had gained 
 their wealth at a time when the struggle 
 for wealth went by personal prowess 
 rather than by the machine gun ; and 
 they often knew the quarter-deck as well 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 91 
 
 as the counting-house, and the library as 
 well as either. The Civil War was still 
 but a distant growling, and yet threat- 
 ening enough to stimulate the grim Puri- 
 tan blood, which seems to do best under 
 indignation. The land was pullulent 
 with poets, artists, and sages, of whom 
 no inconsiderable number really came 
 to some accomplishment. 
 
 The better part of this activity was 
 literary, not scientific. But men of let- 
 ters always recognised Agassiz as one of 
 their own kind, and he found his niche in 
 any intellectual society. It is to Agassiz 
 the man, the brilliant and bewitching 
 companion, the charming and affection- 
 ate friend, the lover of fun as well 
 as of wit and wisdom, and to Agassiz 
 the inspired teacher of breathless au- 
 diences, more than to Agassiz the 
 learned ichthyologist and geologist, that 
 we find constant reference. Emerson 
 and Longfellow, Holmes and Lowell, 
 are the names with which his is asso- 
 
92 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 elated by the general reader. The men- 
 tions of Agassiz in verse and the poems 
 directly addressed to him or to his 
 memory are enough to give him a place 
 in literature a feature in a scientific 
 biography for which we can think of 
 no parallel. Darwin's work is far more 
 familiar to the outside world, and the 
 ideas for which Darwin stands sponsor 
 are running amuck through poetry and 
 prose ; but where are the personal trib- 
 utes to him which can be called enduring 
 literature ? 
 
 We do not mean by this to imply that 
 the verses written to Agassiz are in any 
 case great poems ; but they are certainly 
 on that level where the world keeps 
 them for their own sake/ not merely of 
 the kind that pupils and kindred shall 
 not willingly let die. Any one who 
 does not know Lowell's long ode to 
 Agassiz should read it forthwith for the 
 sake of the character-painting. Longfel- 
 low's u Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz" 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 93 
 
 is probably known to every reader. 
 When it was read before the Saturday 
 Club, Agassiz broke down over the last 
 verse with the reference to his mother. 
 His special thanks to Longfellow for 
 another set of verses, written in French 
 to accompany a gift of wine, were given 
 because his mother could understand the 
 French ; and they are too pretty to 
 omit : " I was on my way to your house, 
 when, from thinking of my mother, 
 great tears began to fill my eyes ; and, 
 fearing to be taken for an idiot, I re- 
 turned home. ... I can let my good 
 mother read my wine, if I cannot let her 
 taste it. 
 
 Longfellow and Agassiz had a very 
 tender feeling for each other, and Long- 
 fellow wrote him from abroad of "the 
 delight with which I found your memory 
 so beloved in England. At Cambridge, 
 Professor Sedgwick said : < Give my love 
 to Agassiz. Give him the blessing of an 
 old man. 9 In London, Sir Eoderick 
 
94 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 Murchison said ; f I liave known a great 
 many men that I liked ; bnt I love Agas- 
 siz.' In the Isle of Wight, Darwin said : 
 1 What a set of men you have in Cam- 
 bridge ! Both our universities put to- 
 gether cannot furnish the like. Why, 
 there is Agassiz, he counts for three.' " 
 The published recollections of Agassiz 
 constantly repeat that only those who 
 knew him personally can appreciate his 
 power or understand the charm he exer- 
 cised. ' ' Never, ' ' said Emerson, ' < could 
 his work be separated from himself.'' 
 "He was the largest in personality of all 
 the men I ever knew,' 7 says another 
 writer. And still another speaks of a 
 kind of human presence worth more than 
 any scholastic artifices, widening the 
 mind as if by enchantment. Such a 
 human presence at Harvard was Louis 
 Agassiz. "Can one ever forget that 
 beaming face as he used to come stroll- 
 ing across the yard, with lighted cigar, 
 in serene obliviousness of the university 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 95 
 
 statutes ? ? ' An individuality so forceful 
 that casual acquaintances knew him for a 
 great man went with magnificent physi- 
 cal strength, and with a childlike inno- 
 cence and belief in the goodness of 
 everybody and the kindness of fate. He 
 was always happy, always interested, 
 always eager to share his last piece of 
 good luck with his neighbours. An un- 
 conquered joy was strong within him, 
 and he walked in paths of pleasantness, 
 
 " He that was friends with earth, and all 
 
 her sweet 
 Took with both hands unsparingly." 
 
 'No description omits his quick tears and 
 his ringing laughter. Agassiz once said 
 that he had never known a dull hour in 
 his life ; and he thought it an incredible 
 joke that any person could seek to kill 
 time in a world so full of interest., 
 "Only give me these spare hours of 
 yours," he exclaimed. "I can fill them 
 full enough !" 
 
96 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 A composite portrait stands out clearly 
 from the mere words or phrases that 
 various writers have fitted to Agassiz, if 
 we string them along in ungrammat- 
 ical sequence : His genial countenance, Ms 
 great face beaming with pleasure, the eyes 
 whose sunshine runs before the lips; a firm 
 benignity of face, and winning ways; his 
 phrases all the more taJcing for the broken 
 English; an inexhaustible buoyancy and 
 huge good fellowship ; robust and dominat- 
 ing ; cheerful, Jcindly, engaging, frank, ir- 
 resistible; ingenuous, glad, great-hearted, 
 and bewitching ; the jovial giant, the ac- 
 knowledged master ; a man to be thankful 
 for, with unsleeping observation and per- 
 fectly communicative; the unlettered woods- 
 man ran to meet his service; 'no one could 
 stand before his smile ; and he flooded every 
 company with the wealth of his own opulent 
 nature, 
 
 "Brimful of lusty blood as ever ran, 
 And talcing life as simply as a tree ! " 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 97 
 
 The face forms on the canvas, even 
 under such disconnected touches the 
 face of an eminently lovable man, full of 
 the primal force of personality, abound- 
 ing in good will and bearing malice to 
 nobody. One wonders that such a man 
 ever made an enemy. When he did, 
 jealousy was at the root of the matter 
 nine times in ten, helped on by Agassiz's 
 habit of putting to the best scientific use 
 everything on which he could lay his 
 hand, whether the property was material 
 or intellectual. 
 
 One French scientific friend never 
 called him anything but ce cher Agassiz, 
 which reminds us of the farewell toasts 
 at the club, before his voyages of ex- 
 ploration : 
 
 "To dear Agassiz" and 
 
 "Heaven bless the Great Professor, 
 And the land his proud possessor ! '* 
 
 In his will he calls himself "Louis 
 Agassiz, Teacher." To characterise 
 
98 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 him as a teacher, we take again the 
 plentiful phrases waiting us ; and they 
 all may be reduced to two things, his 
 own enjoyment and his sympathy. He 
 could write the primary divisions of the 
 animal kingdom on the blackboard with 
 delight, and turn to see whether his 
 class had taken the idea, with the same 
 interest when he did it for the thou- 
 sandth time in America as when he 
 faced his first audience in Neuch&tel. 
 He had a most patient toleration of dull 
 and ignorant persons ; and, if a pupil 
 wished to learn, that was more than 
 enough. As a lecturer, he carried his 
 audience captive. All caught a sparkle 
 of his enthusiasm, and were fired by his 
 ardour. There was contagion in him. 
 He was himself a scientific force. He 
 lacked rancour, spoke courteously of 
 opponents, and took as much pleasure 
 in the discoveries of others as in his 
 own. And, finally, he was u mag- 
 netic" so often that we ought to raise 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 99 
 
 the word to a high, power to make it 
 take due place in onr portrait. But his 
 greatest power lay in his own profound 
 conviction of the beauty and importance 
 of the things with which he dealt. He 
 was reported at the Lowell Institute 
 as using "rapturous terms concerning 
 glaciation in Maine.'' Here was a man 
 after Sydney Smith's own heart. Who 
 can imagine Agassiz speaking disre- 
 spectfully of the equator! 
 
XL 
 
 THE narrative of Agassiz's life flows 
 evenly for some ten or fifteen years after 
 his establishment in America. He was 
 always poor ; bnt his poverty grew less 
 extreme, and lost all its bitterness as his 
 debts disappeared. A modest salary 
 was assured by his Harvard position; 
 and outside the university his lectures 
 not only were well paid, but, when re- 
 printed in book form, they sold well, 
 and he ventured on one or two popular 
 text-books. The scheme which relieved 
 him for good and all of anxiety concern- 
 ing his daily bread was due to his wife. 
 With the help of the older children she 
 planned a day school for young ladies, 
 which should enjoy the great advantage 
 of Agassiz's name and roof as well as the 
 inestimable advantage of his teaching. 
 The plan worked to a charm, and helped 
 him in more ways than one, as it sub- 
 stituted employment at his own home 
 
LOTJIS AGA&SIZ 101 
 
 for the fatiguing and sometimes fever 
 ishly hurried tours through the country, 
 which interfered with research and re- 
 acted on his health. Long years of con- 
 stant overwork began to tell on the mag- 
 nificent constitution which had been his 
 best tool ; and during the last twenty 
 years of his life he was interrupted by 
 nervous illnesses, more and more fre- 
 quent, almost always due to overwork 
 of the brain. 
 
 A list of his published writings shows 
 hundreds of technical scientific papers, 
 reprints of popular lectures, reports to 
 the government or to the Coast Survey, 
 addresses on educational subjects and 
 all this besides a miscellaneous scientific 
 correspondence which might have stag- 
 gered a younger man. 
 
 The most ambitious work in original 
 research planned during his American 
 life is the Contributions to the Natural His- 
 tory of the United States. This was to 
 embrace ten large volumes. An elabo- 
 
102 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 rate prospectus was issued in 1855, and 
 subscriptions poured in from all parts of 
 the country. The enthusiasm shown by 
 the public surprised even Agassiz, who 
 found the cost of the work guaranteed be- 
 forehand, in happy contrast to the Fossil 
 Fishes. It was largely from the unlearned 
 average class of readers that money was 
 promised him ; and he strongly felt the 
 obligation toward that class, and avoided 
 technical words whenever this was possi- 
 ble. Warned by experience perhaps, he 
 had planned that each volume should be 
 complete in itself, so that anything which 
 might prevent completion of the whole 
 work should not injure the separate parts. 
 This precaution was well justified, as only 
 four of the ten volumes were ever written. 
 The reason of course was that a thousand 
 other things were crying out to be done, 
 and that in particular he grew more and 
 more absorbed in the great Museum 
 which stands at Harvard to-day as the 
 direct result of his labours. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 103 
 
 Being interested above all things in 
 comparative science and in structure 
 even more than in function, Agassiz was 
 of course a collector. He had been con- 
 stantly collecting from the time he was 
 old enough to paddle about the Swiss 
 lakes in search of eels and chub. All 
 was fish that came to his net the more 
 the better, since specimens could then 
 be exchanged and also sacrificed without 
 compunction when they were wanted for 
 a demonstration. Any money which had 
 not been twice spent on other things was 
 lavished on the purchase, transportation, 
 and care of specimens. Once we have 
 seen that his collections did him good 
 service outside their use for his investi- 
 gations, since it was their sale which en- 
 abled him to marry, and on the money 
 they brought he had lived for some time 
 at Neuchatel. The nominal ownership 
 of the things, so long as they were prop- 
 erly arranged for use by scientific men, 
 was of too little consequence for Agassiz 
 
104 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 to spend a moment's regret on the matter. 
 When he came to America, he had come 
 comparatively unencumbered, making a 
 fresh start in this as in other things ; and 
 his earliest letters are full of remorse 
 that he had not brought with him any- 
 thing and everything he could lay hands 
 on, so jbhat he might make exchanges for 
 the new specimens he found on all sides. 
 He used to come home laden with spoil 
 from the fish market in every new place 
 he visited ; and, as his fame grew, it be- 
 came the thing for any person who found 
 something peculiar to forward it to the 
 Great Professor, who was always grateful, 
 always interested. The fishermen at 
 Nahant, where he spent his summers, 
 would go miles out of their way to bring 
 him anything they thought i ' queer, ? ? and 
 feel amply rewarded by his delighted 
 greeting. He was once embarrassed by 
 the unexpected arrival of a lively black 
 bear, for whom his establishment offered 
 but poor accommodation; and, while he 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 105 
 
 was at work upon the Forth American 
 Testudinata, turtles rained in upon him 
 from every point of the compass. Even 
 the cases, jars, and alcohol necessary for 
 such collections were of great value. A 
 rickety old shanty on the river-bank was 
 offered by Harvard for storage, and 
 afterward a better wooden building on 
 the college grounds, with four hundred 
 dollars a year for the cost of keeping the 
 specimens in good condition. This was 
 good in so far as it s&ved Agassiz four 
 hundred dollars a year, but the cost of 
 preservation was far greater than this; 
 and in 1850 twelve thousand dollars was 
 raised by private subscription to pur- 
 chase the collections and secure them 
 for Cambridge. "This gave him back 
 in part the sum he had already spent 
 upon them, and which he was more than 
 ready to spend again in their mainte- y 
 nance and increase." 
 
 So matters stood when one of the high- 
 est zoological positions in the world was 
 
106 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 offered to Agassiz the chair of palae- 
 ontology at Paris. He had already de- 
 clined a call to Zurich, and even this 
 invitation to take the place so long held 
 by Cuvier did not take him back to 
 Europe. He was in love ' i the word, ' 7 
 says Mrs. Agassiz, ' i is none too strong ' ? 
 with his work in America ; and, though 
 he recognised that the highest of scien- 
 tific honours had been tendered him 
 especially when the French government 
 offered to keep the post open long enough 
 to allow the completion of work actually 
 on hand he deliberately declined it. 
 It is said that he might have had com- 
 bined salaries amounting to nearly fif- 
 teen thousand dollars, with the highest 
 rank, social and scientific, and the direc- 
 torship of the Jardin des Plantes, so 
 anxious was France to secure him on any 
 terms. Later on the offer was renewed, 
 and only three months of residence yearly 
 was asked from him. It is small wonder 
 that his refusal brought a burst of enthu- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 107 
 
 siasm from the American people, and 
 that nothing which they could give 
 seemed good enough for him. His abso- 
 lute unconcern about personal wealth 
 was a trait especially picturesque in 
 America. Its sincerity was too patent 
 for any scoffer to doubt it, and this gave 
 him the more power over moneyed men. 
 Though always poor himself, he had scien- 
 tific use and control of very large sums 
 of private and public money. Legisla- 
 tures voted funds on his authority, mill- 
 ionaires brought him offerings, and stu- 
 dents subscribed their savings for his 
 plans. If we had his account-book, it 
 certainly would read like a fairy-tale of 
 science. Yet these funds were from hand 
 to mouth : he never could be sure when 
 a new plan presented itself that the 
 necessary means would follow ; and, as his 
 health broke down, he had attacks of, 
 despondency which contradicted his very 
 nature. 
 
 In 1858 the Museum which had long 
 
108 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 existed in Agassiz' s mind began really 
 to take material shape. Mr. Francis C. 
 Gray, during Ms life a friend and helper 
 of Agassiz, left by will a sura of fifty 
 thousand dollars for a Museum of Com- 
 parative Zoology. It was just after 
 Agassiz' s refusal of the invitation to 
 Paris had roused public enthusiasm to its 
 highest. Harvard University offered to 
 give land for a site, the legislature voted 
 other lands equivalent to a yearly income 
 of several thousand dollars, private sub- 
 scriptions promptly raised seventy thou- 
 sand dollars for the cost of the building ; 
 architects asked to contribute their 
 work ; and Agassiz presented all the 
 collections he had amassed since the 
 former sale, a gift estimated at well 
 over ten thousand - dollars. In June, 
 1859, the corner-stone was laid ; and 
 one of the greatest comparative museums 
 of the world had fairly begun to be. 
 
 With dramatic propriety, Agassiz took 
 the summer when his Museum was at 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 109 
 
 last building for a short visit to Europe 
 his first and only return. He had 
 been in America thirteen years as 
 long as he had lived in Neueh&teL He 
 had left home famous indeed, but unsuc- 
 cessful in all practical affairs : he came 
 back laden with honours and free from 
 debt. It was but a flying visit. All his 
 time on the Continent was spent with 
 his mother, with only two days for 
 Alexander Braun and a week in scien- 
 tific Paris. Then in the autumn of 1859 
 he returned to Cambridge, to find the 
 Museum building well under way. 
 
 The administration of a great Museum 
 had been for half his lifetime one of 
 Agassiz's day-dreams. He had seen 
 enough of the wasted opportunities and 
 lack of organisation in many great 
 museums. The art of managing collec- 
 tions to the best advantage is as modern 
 as the sister profession of the librarian ; 
 and it is hardly a boast to say that both 
 have been chiefly cisatlantic. As in 
 
110 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 all Agassiz's work, much consideration 
 was paid to the intelligent but unlearned 
 public. Specimens were so put into 
 different cases and rooms that the whole 
 system of group and sub-group could be 
 followed by a novice and verified by the 
 help of a synopsis printed on the walls. 
 A geographical classification of animals 
 was carried out in another part of the 
 building, where the characteristic fauna 
 of each region was exhibited This feat- 
 ure was particularly emphasised ; for 
 Agassiz believed that the distribution 
 and range of animals would furnish data 
 for determining in how many various 
 centres a species had originated. He 
 found the distinct geographical limit 
 of wild species very surprising. "I 
 think/' he said once^. with his taking 
 French accent, "that they had their 
 legs only if they should not run away ! " 
 The vulgar idea of a museum as merely 
 a place for the storage of curiosities was 
 contradicted in every room. A rare 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 111 
 
 animal is of no more intrinsic value for 
 teaching zoology than a common one; 
 and the nses of the Museum for instruc- 
 tion were always put first. As an insti- 
 tution, it was made an integral part of 
 Harvard University ; an adequate teach- 
 ing staff was provided, and a Bulletin 
 issued regularly. To-day the building 
 is some three times as large as when 
 Agassiz knew it, the larger part of the 
 addition being at the expense of his son 
 and successor ; and, as we write, it is an- 
 nounced that the three children of Louis 
 Agassiz have offered to complete the 
 plan and unite the wings of the great 
 building, which should stand a monu- 
 ment to the name of Agassiz as durable 
 as the fossils within it. It was by Agas- 
 siz' s own request made improper to call 
 the Museum by his name, but this legal 
 disability is entirely ignored by the 
 public. Over the main entrance is the 
 proper title " University Museum of 
 Comparative Zoology " and just be- 
 
112 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 yond the threshold Powers' s marble bust 
 of Agassiz smiles a benevolent welcome ; 
 and by a dedicatory tablet in the wall 
 the newer portion of the building is 
 offered to his father by Alexander, son 
 of Louis Agassiz. 
 
XII. 
 
 ALTHOUGH Agassiz had so definitely 
 adopted America, lie was not legally a 
 citizen of the United States until in the 
 darkest hour of the Civil War he took 
 out his naturalisation papers a small 
 public act to indicate his feeling. He 
 abhorred slavery, and yet he was a 
 cause of offence to the Abolitionists be- 
 cause of his opinion that the negro and 
 the white represented distinct species. 
 Another opinion concerning the human 
 race, that it could not possibly have de- 
 scended from one couple and had sprung 
 from several independent centres, had 
 at one time brought him abuse, while 
 at the same time he was abused for up- 
 holding the order of creation as given 
 in Genesis and for his immediate re- 
 course to the Deity when explanation 
 was to seek. So, too, on the negro ques- 
 tion, both sides accused him of time- 
 serving. All matters of acclimatisation, 
 
114 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 amalgamation, the probable fate and 
 danger of the half- breed, etc., interested 
 him greatly ; but he kept their scientific 
 and social aspects apart, and was sur- 
 prised when those who reported his opin- 
 ions failed to do the same. Why a be- 
 lief that the ancestors of two men were 
 created in different regions should carry 
 with it the belief that one of them has 
 a moral right to buy and sell the other 
 is not evident to logic ; but a country 
 struggling for life and death is not in a 
 mood for strict logic. When the war 
 had actually begun, no one could longer 
 doubt Agassiz's patriotism. His letters 
 are full of the war and of his own in- 
 tense feeling. His loyalty showed also in 
 another shape his constant urging that 
 American scholars should feel their re- 
 sponsibility to the country as well as to 
 the scientific world, should publish their 
 results at home, and throw off the intel- 
 lectual tyranny which had survived the 
 political form. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 115 
 
 Before peace had come, a wholly new 
 scientific scheme took Agassiz out of the 
 country for a time. In the winter of 
 1865 his health was such that a vacation 
 and a change of scene were imperative. 
 He proposed to spend some months 
 quietly with his wife in Eio de Janeiro. 
 Toward Brazil he was drawn by a life- 
 long desire ; for with the longing for 
 wider knowledge of the globe and the 
 still unquenched thirst for travel in 
 strange regions there mingled a special 
 personal wish to meet in their own 
 waters those fishes of Spix to whom he 
 owed his introduction to the scientific 
 world. His plan for a complete rest 
 was characteristically transformed in 
 the twinkling of an eye by a chance 
 meeting with Mr. Nathaniel Thayer, a 
 wealthy and public-spirited Bostonian, 
 who offered to make the journey a scien- 
 tific expedition by paying the expenses 
 of six assistants. "It was so simply said, 
 and seemed to me so great a boon, that 
 
116 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 at first I hardly believed I had heard 
 him rightly. . . . Not only did he pro- 
 vide most liberally for assistants, but 
 ... he continued to advance whatever 
 sums were needed. " The expedition 
 proved longer and more costly than was 
 at first anticipated, " which/' Agassiz 
 hastily adds, "is usual in such cases." 
 He wrote the news to his mother, say- 
 ing, "You will shed tears of joy when 
 you read this, but such tears are harm- 
 less. 77 Then follow some of the wonder- 
 ful favours already vouchsafed him. 
 The steamship has invited the whole 
 party to travel free of charge. The gov- 
 ernment has surprised him by desiring 
 naval officers to aid his party. "I seem 
 like the spoiled child of the country ; 
 and I hope God will giye me strength to 
 repay in devotion to her institutions and 
 to her scientific and intellectual develop- 
 ment, all that her citizens have done for 
 me. ' ' 
 
 This overjoyed gratitude breathes also 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 117 
 
 from the pages of the joint journal kept 
 by Mr. and Mrs. Agassiz A Journey 
 in Brazil. Such extraordinary kindness 
 and goodness had never pursued any- 
 body before. From the emperor who, 
 on the very battlefield, ordered collec- 
 tions made of the fishes in the southern 
 rivers along which his army marched, 
 down to the humblest Indian who took 
 an interest in the extraordinary tastes of 
 his white visitors, the tale of universal 
 good will is the same. 
 
 Agassiz thankfully compares all this 
 with the difficulties encountered some 
 forty years before by his old teacher 
 Martius and with those braved by the 
 still earlier expedition of Humboldt. 
 Re-reading Humboldt' s Narrative on the 
 spot, he says, "I could not but con- 
 trast the cordial liberality which 
 smoothed every difficulty in my path 
 with the dangers, obstacles, and suffer- 
 ing which beset his." Off Santarem, 
 where the dark waters of the Tapajoz 
 
118 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 enter the yellow Amazon, Martins, 
 whose little vessel fonnd the crossing of 
 the river always dangerous, had come 
 near to losing his life by shipwreck ; 
 and after his safe return to Munich he 
 sent a votive Christ to the little church 
 which stands upon the beach. Thither 
 Agassiz made a dutiful visit when his 
 own special steamer, provided free of 
 charge by the Brazilian government, 
 touched at Santarem. 
 
 Laden with valuable collections for the 
 Museum, with some eighteen hundred 
 new species of fish added to the two 
 hundred formerly known to inhabit the 
 Amazon, with accumulated observations 
 concerning the geographical distribution 
 of fishes in the river-basin a subject 
 which always fascinated Agassiz and 
 with much testimony of greater or less 
 value concerning former glaciers in the 
 tropics, he returned home in the summer 
 of 1866, and promptly fell to work again. 
 He gave some public courses of lectures 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 119 
 
 the next winter, speaking first of all at 
 the Lowell Institute npon the scientific 
 results of the Brazilian journey. If he 
 seemed stronger in health, it was through 
 the mere revivifying force of such enjoy- 
 ment. Not only to his eager intellect 
 had the year brought satisfaction. His 
 scientific delights were added to all the 
 enjoyments of an ordinary traveller. 
 Only one who has never felt it can speak 
 lightly of the wonderful sensuous beauty 
 of the tropical forests, ceiled as well as 
 carpeted with flowers ; the air swooning 
 with heavy scents ; the narrow boat- 
 paths winding through tangled archi- 
 pelagoes ; the gunner's bag of birds look- 
 ing like a bunch of flowers ; the insects 
 by day and by night like living jewels ; 
 the colour, angry and brave, that is the 
 very soul of the tropics ; 
 
 "And all the marvel of the golden 
 skies. 77 
 
xm. 
 
 WHEN explanations of natural laws 
 were needed, Agassiz had immediate re- 
 course to tlie creative act or thought of 
 the Deity. He believed that a careful 
 student of the successive variations im- 
 posed on the great primary types of the 
 animal kingdom might trace the work- 
 ings of the divine mind in the same 
 sense in which the processes of a human 
 mind are traced through the various 
 works uttered by a human artificer. 
 
 The mystical half of Agassiz' s expla- 
 nation is easily referred to the former in- 
 fluences of Munich. One cannot under- 
 stand the nature- philosophy then in 
 vogue without remembering the Ger- 
 man school of philosophy proper. Kant, 
 Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had fol- 
 lowed one another rapidly, all at work 
 upon the old question of the reality of 
 the external world, and all with the be- 
 lief in an a priori knowledge indepen- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 121 
 
 dent of experience. To the pure idealist 
 the world of the normal man has no 
 more real existence than the visions of 
 delirium. It is a series of mental phe- 
 nomena, to be explained by the laws of 
 mind ; and the proper study of logician, 
 chemist, and zoologist, is man. Asser- 
 tions about what can and cannot be in 
 nature, when dated from the closet and 
 not from the laboratory, have proved 
 false because the intellect which dictated 
 the rules was feeble, not because the 
 method was intrinsically absurd. 
 
 The spirit which had informed that 
 era was still dominant at Munich during 
 the three years which stamped them- 
 selves so deeply upon Agassiz. Schelling 
 and Oken were the two most famous pro- 
 fessorsthe philosopher who asserted 
 his right to teach zoology and the zoo- 
 logist who insisted on introducing philos- 
 ophy. Oken was an avowed natural- 
 ist ; and, if he decided first, he at least 
 hoped to find himself confirmed by the 
 
122 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 facts, and thought it worth while to look 
 for them. Agassiz had from the be- 
 ginning the modern habit of hearing 
 testimony first and giving judgment 
 afterward. Even as a student, he dis- 
 agreed with many of Oken's ideas ; and 
 as a teacher, he repeatedly and earnestly 
 warned all students against listening to 
 any witness but Nature herself. Much 
 more must Agassiz have rejected Schel- 
 ling's scientific ukases. It is not likely 
 that Schelling influenced him on any 
 purely zoological matter, but he evi- 
 dently had much influence on Agassiz' s 
 idea of ivhat constitutes an explanation. 
 Had there never been any question about 
 facts, zoological theories would still be 
 interesting, because it must be interest- 
 ing to get at what any thinking man 
 considers a satisfactory stopping-place in 
 explanation whether he rests the world 
 on a tortoise or insists on supporting the 
 tortoise by a protozoon, or perhaps 
 underwrites it all by the Word which 
 was in the beginning. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 123 
 
 Now Schelling 7 s system of philosophy 
 makes a close parallelism between the 
 internal and external worlds, to which it 
 allows an equal reality, making both, 
 however, but parallel manifestations of 
 some higher and more inclusive reality, 
 which is the thinker and the thought. 
 Natural facts are mere manifestations 
 of mind. This is a favourite saying 
 with Schelling as with Agassiz ; but 
 Agassiz is almost entirely concerned with 
 the derivation of Nature from the mind 
 of God, and pays less attention to the 
 reciprocal relations between human 
 thought and the things that cause it. 
 " Every thing organic is more or less of 
 a symbol. A plant is a corporealised 
 throb of the soul. 77 This is Schelling 7 s, 
 and may well suggest Agassiz 7 s maxim, 
 " A species is a thought of the Crea- 
 tor. 7 7 But Schelling soon drifts toward 
 poetry, and indeed his ideas are best 
 known in English through his influence 
 on "Wordsworth and Coleridge. "The 
 
124 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 spirit sleeps in the stone, dreams in the 
 animal, and wakes in the man." "Nat- 
 ure is Spirit visible : Spirit is invisible 
 Nature." All these sayings have one 
 central notion, which may seem bold in 
 prose, but in poetry is common to all 
 times and all races. One can trace it all 
 the way from the Orient to the Yankee 
 poet who is most inclined to speak of the 
 " meaning" of natural phenomena or 
 natural objects. 
 
 "They are but sailing foam -bells 
 
 Along Thought's causing stream, 
 
 And take their shape and sun-colour 
 
 From him that sends the dream." 
 
 But Agassiz writes in sober prose ; 
 and the peculiar flavour in his writings 
 comes from his taking the vocabulary of 
 the mystic, and interpreting it as literally 
 true. 
 
 The average man who gives the will of 
 God as an explanation uses the words in 
 rather a Pickwickian sense, as is strik- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 125 
 
 ingly brought home to us when we find a 
 scholar who has no more hesitation in 
 introducing the Creator than in suggest- 
 ing an earthquake or a glacial epoch or 
 any other exceptional agent. A critic 
 feels something like a man who, having 
 acknowledged that daily bread is sent by 
 God, should get no other explanation of 
 a loaf found on the kitchen table. Shall 
 we quarrel with the statement because 
 of mental reservations concerning the 
 baker? 
 
 Again, Agassiz is studying not the 
 human but the divine mind, and the re- 
 sult is doubly startling. We are not apt 
 to think of mysticism and anthropo- 
 morphism together, but with Agassiz we 
 find them inextricably mixed. It is 
 easy to put what we may choose to call 
 Agassiz' s real meaning into terms which 
 his opponents would accept. But it is 
 not easy to convince ourselves that lie 
 would have accepted any such interpreta- 
 tion, nor is it easy to juggle his distinct 
 
126 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 and repeated statements into any shape 
 which shall avoid his plain acceptance 
 of a Deity as frankly anthropomorphic 
 as ever child addressed in prayer or 
 painter throned on clouds. The lack of 
 a mental pou sto affects any one who 
 would examine Him in whom we live 
 and move and have our being, and all 
 our efforts avail not a whit toward shift- 
 ing the centre of gravity. This seems 
 commonplace enough, but we are shocked 
 into a new interest when we find a man 
 apparently unconscious of the difficulty. 
 
 Phrases as startling as those below oc- 
 cur again and again in Agassiz's writings 
 (the italics are not Agassiz's) : 
 
 "We disclose the mental operations of 
 the Creator at every step." - " It is im- 
 possible not to recognise the immediate 
 action of thought, and even to specialise 
 the intellectual faculties it reveals. " " Pre- 
 meditation, .... consecutive thought, the 
 operations of a mind acting in conform- 
 ity with a plan laid out beforehand, and 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 127 
 
 sustained for a long period." "It is 
 not a kind of work which is delegated 
 ... to a law working its way uniformly ; 
 but it is that kind of work which the 
 engineer retains when he superintends 
 and controls his machine while it is work- 
 ing." "When the largest amount and 
 greatest variety of work is produced by 
 a particular invention, we consider the 
 result as indicative of superiority of 
 genius or inventive capacity. Here in 
 the animal kingdom we see it illustrated 
 to an extent which the best trained mind 
 can hardly follow." u The limitation of 
 closely allied species to different geo- 
 logical periods exhibits thought : it ex- 
 hibits- the power of sustaining nice dis- 
 tinctions, notwithstanding the interposition 
 of great disturbances by physical revolu- 
 tions." 
 
 To some minds this seems but faint 
 praise with which to characterise the 
 Creator. It is difficult to-day to state 
 Agassiz's beliefc at once shortly and 
 
128 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 fairly ; that is, without the use of ques- 
 tion-begging epithets which shall suggest 
 either irreverence or absurdity. It is 
 very easy to sneer at them 5 and, if any 
 one wants to see this done in a mas- 
 terly manner, we refer him to HaeckeFs 
 History of Creation (the English transla- 
 tion revised by Professor E. Bay Lancas- 
 ter, the translator mentioned briefly as 
 " a young lady " ). Here he will find a 
 chapter on the doctrines of Cuvier and 
 Agassiz, which, though uncivil almost to 
 brutality in its tearing away any last veil 
 of a decent mysticism, does yet give the 
 theory as Agassiz' s own words warrant 
 it. The creator "plagued with ennui, 
 amusing himself with planning and con- 
 structing most varied toys, ? ' and destroy- 
 ing them by a general revolution, "at 
 last (but very late) struck with the 
 happy thought of creating something 
 like himself/' is really Agassiz' s deity, 
 only described in words which have dis- 
 respectful instead of respectful associa- 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 129 
 
 tions. It is pleasant to note that even 
 such sneering comment is instantly fol- 
 lowed by expressions of admiration for 
 Agassiz's scientific work in zoology. In 
 one sense, this is certainly the most 
 inclusive of all theories of development, 
 since, in following out his thoughts from 
 simpler to more complex beings, we are, 
 as Haeckel says, "driven to the curious 
 supposition that the Creator himself has 
 developed, together with the organic 
 nature which he created. " 
 
 This method of inducing (or should 
 we say deducing?) the creator from the 
 created brings to mind Paley and Butler 
 and perhaps the once famous Bridge- 
 water Treatises. But after once con- 
 founding the infidel, the English theolo- 
 gians let well enough alone, while Agas- 
 siz goes on too far for safety. Yet, among 
 the men who have created God in their 
 own image, surely there has been none 
 other so consistent. The same eager 
 attention and logic which he brought to 
 
130 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 the construction of the life history of an 
 acaleph or the habits of a perished 
 pterodactyl, he turns upon the evidences 
 of a Creator and the finding out of his 
 ways. Every one knows the story of 
 Cuvier and the Devil, who threatened to 
 devour him, and whom the intrepid 
 naturalist classed to his face as an un- 
 doubtedly graminivorous animal, be- 
 cause of his horns and cloven hoofs. A 
 like story told of Agassiz would not have 
 concerned itself with the Devil but 
 perhaps it is just as well to drop the 
 parallel. 
 
 There is of course no reason why Agas- 
 siz 7 s opinions on religious matters should 
 carry weight merely because he was a 
 great naturalist. But he should speak 
 with authority on the question whether 
 the scientific facts then known warranted 
 any theory of evolution by descent. 
 And his opinion on the matter was 
 definite and strongly held to the end of 
 his life ; namely, that no sufficient evi- 
 dence was adduced for such a theory. 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 131 
 
 To-day one of the arguments for evo- 
 lution by descent might run as follows : 
 We have evidence enough to feel cer- 
 tain (1) that no higher form of life 
 comes into existence without parents, 
 and (2) that a given kind of animal or 
 plant came into existence at a time for 
 which we can roughly put upper and 
 lower limits. Hence we conclude that 
 the parents of the first plants or animals 
 of any kind were of some other kind. 
 But what good is such an argument to 
 one who denies our major I The state- 
 ment that an animal does not come into 
 existence without some parent is based 
 on observation. Let reasonable evidence 
 once be brought that the rule is not 
 universal, and the whole subject assumes 
 a different aspect. Cuvier, and after 
 him Agassiz, believed that such evi- 
 dence could be brought, in the reappear- 
 ance of plants and animals, after each 
 cataclysm. 
 According to the geologists of seventy 
 
132 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 years ago, a series of world- wide cata- 
 clysms or catastrophes liad transformed 
 the surface of the earth, doubtless de- 
 stroying all living things and hence 
 separating different creations. If this be 
 true, while the succession of more various 
 and complicated creatures always goes 
 on from where it was left when flood and 
 fire and earthquake turned the earth into 
 a cemetery and the rocks into a museum, 
 then there must be some creative force at 
 work very different from ordinary crea- 
 tion through parent and child 5 and, in 
 Agassiz's own words, "This is not a 
 matter to be argued : it is one to be in- 
 vestigated. 77 
 
 Agassiz declared that the word "evolu- 
 tion 7 ? might be applied to his own theory, 
 the connection between species being, as 
 he continually repeats, "ideal, not mate- 
 rial, 77 the thought of the Creator being 
 gradually unrolled. It is hardly neces- 
 sary to say that his work toward laying 
 bare the laws of such evolution is as 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 133 
 
 valuable to-day, when no one doubts the 
 change of species by descent, as it was 
 when the weight of scientific opinion 
 leaned the other way. " A theory con- 
 nects facts as a string holds the pearls of 
 a necklace : the theory itself may be as 
 worthless as the string." 
 
 Agassiz's enthusiastic belief in the 
 popularising of science makes it inappro- 
 priate to ignore the incompetent public 
 whose discussions have overlaid the 
 scientific debate. Theories of evolution 
 have great simplicity of result along with 
 great technicality in evidence, and they 
 have in consequence a nimiety of cham- 
 pions and of opponents. Even to-day 
 the man whose knowledge is limited to 
 the statement that Darwin said every 
 man was descended from a monkey, will 
 often volunteer to throw the weight of 
 his influence on one side or the other. 
 The great illiterate reading public seems 
 to think that scientific theory is a matter 
 of grace to believe, and that nobody is 
 
134 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 an evolutionist if he does not choose to 
 be. And, as a Harvard tutor said of 
 Agassiz, " To admit a miracle when one 
 isn't necessary seems to be one of those 
 works of supererogation which have sur- 
 vived the Protestant Beformation, and 
 to count like the penances of old for 
 merit." Things are now quieting down, 
 and we have time to ask why the relig- 
 ious should rage and the people imagine 
 a vain thing. The anthropocentric con- 
 ception of the universe dies as hard as did 
 the geocentric, and a blood relationship 
 between men and apes is supposed to 
 affect the question of immortality ; but 
 we note the paradox that Agassiz, who 
 did not believe in the descent of men 
 from brutes, did believe in the immortal- 
 ity of the brute, and was not more than 
 half joking when he predicted the 
 delight of good zoologists in a happy 
 hereafter when saurians and pterodactyls 
 could be immediately compared with 
 their modern successors, nor when he 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 135 
 
 once applauded a farmer for damning 
 the sonls of some oxen. It was like 
 Agassiz to forget the discourteous wish 
 in his pleasure at the courteous belief 
 implied. 
 
XIV. 
 
 IN 1871 the Coast Survey proposed to 
 send a vessel round the Horn to Califor- 
 nia, for the purpose of deep sea dredging ; 
 and Professor Peirce, then the head of the 
 Survey, wrote to ask whether Agassiz's 
 health would allow him to go in her. 
 The iron constitution that had served so 
 well was breaking at last, strained past 
 all elasticity by a lifetime of persistent 
 overwork. We have not chronicled the 
 recurring illnesses that culminated in 
 1869, when there came a sharp and un- 
 mistakable attack that for a short time 
 affected both speech and motion. Agas- 
 siz in discouragement and depression 
 Agassiz hopeless and rebellious this 
 sounds impossible ; and to him it was in- 
 deed the impossible that had happened 
 when his brain no longer obeyed his will. 
 Longfellow's journal tells of attempts to 
 comfort Agassiz, who could only repeat, 
 "But I cannot work ! " and then cover 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 137 
 
 his face with his hands, and weep. After 
 the worst breakdown there were months 
 of slow recovery, when the doctors had 
 forbidden him either to work or to think. 
 This last terrible condition seemed more 
 than he could bear. " Nobody knows 
 what tortures I endure in trying to stop 
 thinking," he burst out to a pupil 
 and then again, with a sort of despairing 
 cry, " Oh, my Museum ! my Museum ! 
 always uppermost, by day and by night, 
 in health and in sickness, always al- 
 ways ! J ? 
 
 In 1871, when the Hassler was fitted 
 out, his strength had returned in part, 
 and along with it his hopefulness. It 
 was decided that the sea voyage would 
 do him good rather than harm ; and 
 Agassiz's letter to Professor Peirce, ac- 
 cepting provisionally, sounds like him- 
 self : "I am overjoyed at the prospect 
 your letter opens before me. Of course, 
 I will go unless Brown-Sequard orders 
 me positively to stay on terra firma. But 
 
138 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 even then I should like to have a hand 
 in arranging the party, as I feel that 
 there never was, and is not likely soon 
 again to be, such an opportunity for 
 promoting the cause of science generally 
 and that of natural history in particu- 
 lar. " 
 
 The voyage lasted from December, 
 1871, to August, 1872. Mrs. Agassiz ac- 
 companied her husband again, acting as 
 secretary ; and a joint journal, partly per- 
 sonal, partly scientific, was kept by the 
 two, but was never completely published. 
 Long and interesting letters reporting 
 progress to Professor Peirce were given 
 to the public ; but more interesting than 
 any of these was the letter Agassiz wrote 
 just before sailing, in which he desired 
 to leave on record his expectations con- 
 cerning the fauna of the deep sea. It 
 was his opinion that the conditions of 
 pressure, temperature, darkness, etc., 
 which prevail at great depths would be 
 accompanied by a fauna resembling that 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 139 
 
 of earlier geologic times. Unfortunately, 
 the dredging apparatus of the Hassler 
 was faulty, and the most important hauls 
 were lost, so that the expedition cannot 
 be called successful ; and the prophecies 
 remained to wait fulfilment or contra- 
 diction. 
 
 As regards glacial work, the results 
 were better. The magnificent glaciers 
 of the Straits of Magellan gave Agassiz 
 "a kind of home feeling," and among 
 them he passed " weeks of exquisite de- 
 light." The traces of past glaciers still 
 more magnificent were as he had foretold 
 them. The lover of travels will find in 
 Mrs. Agassiz 7 s journal both charming 
 narrative and vivid word-painting, the 
 pictures ranging in subject from the 
 boat-load of degraded Fuegian savages 
 clamouring for beads and biscuits, pray- 
 ing, shrieking, screaming, to the unheed- 
 ing engines that bore all chance of more 
 "tabac" away from them ; to the calm 
 and stately panorama of the Straits of 
 
140 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 Magellan, with the wonderfully sym- 
 metrical Melinioya, white as purest 
 marble to the summit, a Fusiyama of 
 the south ] and ; again, to the lava cave 
 in the Galapagos, which made a stately 
 banquet hall, after the red and orange- 
 coloured iguanas who generally used it 
 had been either ousted or " collected. 77 
 Agassiz travelled overland through Chili 
 from Talcahuana to Santiago. His state 
 of health was now always obtruding it- 
 self. For a long time he had used the 
 remedy of the very strong and the very 
 weak, and had believed by ignoring his 
 troubles to persuade them out of exist- 
 ence. But now they could no longer 
 be ignored. And when the vessel 
 reached San Francisco, Agassiz rested 
 for a month in California without an 
 attempt to see the Great Trees, and then 
 submitted to be brought home across 
 the Eocky Mountains without seeking 
 for so much as a glacial scratch by the 
 way two little facts which speak whole 
 chapters. 
 
XV. 
 
 ONCE more, and only once more, was 
 Agassiz to respond to a new opportu- 
 nity, and lead his followers to a new sort 
 of service. When he reached home in 
 1872, there was waiting him a plan for 
 a summer school of natural history, to 
 be established on the seacoast and 
 managed with special reference to those 
 teachers who wished to turn pupil again, 
 and could do so only in their vacation. 
 Observation, not memorising ; verifica- 
 tion of every statement 5 constant appeal 
 to nature these were the things to be 
 emphasised. Teaching directly from 
 nature is now, if not practised, at least 
 universally preached. But this was not 
 true in the American schools of a gene- 
 ration ago, and Agassiz was untiring in 
 his efforts for a fundamental reform. 
 " Appeal to Nature, " was his constant 
 precept : "No one can warp her to suit 
 his own views. She brings us back to 
 
142 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 absolute truth as often as we wander.' 7 
 Once, when he was to give a lecture on 
 articulates, before a school for girls, he 
 arrived with a liberal supply of very 
 active grasshoppers, distributed them 
 one to each listener, and insisted that 
 everything he said should be verified as 
 far as was possible. "Whenever an insect 
 escaped, the lecture was held to await its 
 recapture. This, Agassiz says, seemed 
 to amuse the young ladies 5 but to him it 
 was a question of principle. 
 
 A summer school for teachers was then 
 as great an innovation as a marine 
 laboratory, common though both things 
 are to-day. Agassiz took up the scheme 
 with characteristic ardour. " Means 
 there were none, nor apparatus, nor 
 building, nor even a site for one. There 
 was only the ideal, and to that he 
 brought the undying fervour of his in- 
 tellectual faith. " And again his faith 
 was justified. An impassioned appeal to 
 the legislature of Massachusetts, when 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 143 
 
 the members of that body were paying 
 their annual visit to the Museum, seems 
 to have left them cold. At least they did 
 not go into executive session on the steps 
 of the Museum and vote the money. 
 Such practical performance was left for 
 Mr. John Anderson, a rich merchant of 
 New York, who read the appeal in the 
 evening papers, and promptly offered 
 Agassiz the island of Penikese (one of 
 the smaller Elizabeth Islands), with the 
 house and barn then standing upon it, 
 and fifty thousand dollars. With such 
 a windfall, Agassiz was not the man to 
 postpone his school because the architects 
 talked of "simple impossibility." This 
 was in May. He announced the opening 
 for July 8 5 on July 5 the dormitory 
 had no floors and no roof to speak of. 
 
 "The next day was Sunday. Agassiz 
 called the carpenters together. He told 
 them that the scheme was neither for 
 money nor for the making of money ; 
 no personal gain was involved in it. It 
 
144 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 was for the best interests of education, 
 and for that alone. Having explained 
 the object and stated the emergency, he 
 asked whether, under these circumstances 
 the next day was properly for rest or 
 for work. They all answered, 'for 
 work.' They accordingly worked the 
 following day from dawn till dark, and 
 by nightfall the floors were laid. 77 
 
 One day more, and the necessary nails 
 were driven just as the expected steamer 
 touched the wharf. Agassiz was wait- 
 ing with a welcome at the landing-place, 
 his face aglow with pleasure and thank- 
 fulness. To the barn where the swal- 
 lows 7 nests were still undisturbed between 
 the rafters, and the birds kept flying in 
 and out of the wide doors, the teachers 
 and guests went for the "Opening address ; 
 and as Agassiz stood looking at his fifty 
 chosen pupils, his finished buildings, his 
 blue sea beyond them teeming with the 
 life they were to study, in a burst of un- 
 ashamed emotion he called on all present 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 145 
 
 to pray in silence for a blessing on their 
 work together. Unvulgarised by repeti- 
 tion, such an impulse touched the more 
 repressed natures with whom he had to 
 do. "I would not have any man to 
 pray for me now," he said j and many 
 must have remembered the words, when 
 a few months later, his students bore his 
 coffin into the chapel of Harvard College. 
 
 On coming back from Penikese, Agas- 
 siz tried to do his work as usual. For 
 some time his strength held out. All 
 through October and November he was 
 busy at the Museum, and was as always 
 planning, writing, and lecturing. But 
 his last appearance as a lecturer came on 
 December 2, and the rest we give in Mrs. 
 Agassiz's own words : 
 
 " Those who accompanied him, and 
 knew the mental and physical depression 
 which had hung about him for weeks, 
 could not see him take his place on the 
 platform without anxiety. And yet, 
 when he turned to the blackboard, and 
 
146 LOUIS AGASSIZ 
 
 with a single sweep of the chalk drew 
 the faultless outline of an egg, it seemed 
 impossible that anything could be amiss 
 with the hand or the brain that were so 
 steady and so clear. 
 
 " The end, nevertheless, was very near. 
 Although he dined with friends the next 
 day, and was present at a family festival 
 that week, he spoke of a dimness of 
 sight and of feeling < strangely asleep. ' 
 On the 6th he returned early from the 
 Museum, complaining of great weari- 
 ness, and from that time he never left 
 his room. Attended in his illness by his 
 friends, Dr. Brown-Sequard and Dr. 
 Morrill Wyman, and surrounded by his 
 family, the closing week of his life was 
 undisturbed by acute suffering and full 
 of domestic happiness. Even the voices 
 of his brother and sisters were not wholly 
 silent, for the wires that thrill with so 
 many human interests brought their 
 message of greeting and farewell across 
 the ocean to his bedside. The thoughts 
 
LOUIS AGASSIZ 147 
 
 and aims for which, he had lived were 
 often on his lips, but the affections were 
 more vivid than the intellect in these 
 last hours. The end came very peace- 
 fully, on the 14th of December, 1873. 
 He lies buried at Mount Auburn. The 
 boulder that makes his monument came 
 from the glacier of the Aar, not far 
 from the spot where his hut once stood; 
 and the pine-trees which are fast grow- 
 ing up to shelter it were sent by loving 
 hands from his old home in Switzerland. 
 The land of his birth and the land of his 
 adoption are united in his grave. 77 
 
THE FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY OF AGASSIZ. 
 
 It was fifty years ago, 
 In the pleasant month of May, 
 
 In the beautiful Pays de Vaua, 
 A child in its cradle lay. 
 
 And Nature, the old nurse, took 
 
 The child upon her knee, 
 Saying, " Here is a story-book 
 
 Thy Father has written for thee." 
 
 " Come wander with me," she said, 
 
 " Into regions yet untrod ; 
 And read what is still unread 
 
 In the manuscripts of God." 
 
 And he wandered away and away 
 With Nature, the dear old nurse, 
 
 Who sang to him night and day 
 The rhymes of the universe. 
 
 And whenever the way seemed long, 
 
 Or his heart began to fail, 
 She would sing a more wonderful song 
 
 Or tell a more marvellous tale. 
 
 So she keeps him still a child, 
 
 And will not let him go, 
 Though at times his heart beats wild 
 
 For the beautiful Pays de Vaud ; 
 
 Though at times he hears in his dreams 
 
 The Ranz des Vaches of old, 
 And the rush of mountain streams 
 
 From glaciers clear and cold ; 
 
 And the mother at home says, " Hark I 
 For his voice I listen and yearn ; 
 
 It is growing late and dark, 
 And my boy does not return ! " 
 
 May 28, 1857. 
 
BIBLIOGBAPHY. 
 
 There are three longer Lives of Agas- 
 siz (in book form) and also a very large 
 number of shorter accounts of his life in 
 popular or scientific periodicals and in 
 the Transactions of learned societies. A 
 person who aims at exhaustive reading 
 will have scores, if not hundreds, of such 
 articles to deal with ; and any selection 
 from them is necessarily somewhat arbi- 
 trary. The short list given below in 
 chronological order has been made with 
 reference to the average reader of no 
 special tastes, and nothing has been 
 named which cannot be read in English. 
 The three longer Lives were written in 
 English ; the shorter accounts are in 
 many languages, French (naturally) 
 coming next to English in order of fre- 
 quency. Extensive bibliographies are 
 given in Mr. Marcou's and Mr. Holder's 
 books mentioned below. In this list the 
 three longer Lives and three shorter com- 
 
150 BIBLIOGEAPHY 
 
 plete accounts are marked with an 
 asterisk ; the remaining six references are 
 to picturesque sketches of Agassiz or of 
 his work from various points of view. 
 
 I. Proceedings of the California Academy 
 of Sciences. Volume V., December, 
 1872. < ' Agassiz' s Work and Method. > > 
 By Joseph Le Conte. Eeprinted in Mr. 
 Holder's book (see below). This is only 
 one of several articles presented at a 
 memorial meeting of the Academy. 
 
 II. Every Saturday. Volume XVI., 
 1874. "In the Laboratory with Agas- 
 siz. " By Samuel H. Scudder. Also in 
 Scientific American, April 18, 1874, and 
 as appendix to Lowell's "Agassiz," in 
 American Poems, edited by H. E. Scudder. 
 
 III. Atlantic Monthly, February, 1874. 
 "Becollections of Agassiz." By Theo- 
 dore Lyman. 
 
 *IV. Biographical Memoirs of the Na- 
 tional Academy of Sciences. Volume II., 
 
BIBLIOGEAPHY 151 
 
 1878. " Memoir of Louis Agassiz, 1807- 
 1873. ' ? By Arnold Guyot. Also printed 
 separately at Princeton, K J., 1883. 
 
 * V. Annual Report of the Smithsonian In- 
 stitution for 1878. (pp. 236-261. Wash- 
 ington. ) < ' Louis Agassiz. ? ? By Ernest 
 Favre. Translated (from the French) 
 by M. A. Henry. 
 
 *VL Louis AGASSIZ, HIS LIFE AND 
 CORRESPONDENCE. Edited by Elizabeth 
 Gary Agassiz. (Boston and New York : 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 2 vols., 1885 ; 
 1 vol., 1895.) This is the standard work 
 on Agassiz 5 and the ordinary reader will 
 want no other, and will certainly want 
 this. 
 
 *VII. London Quarterly Review. Vol- 
 ume LXYL, July, 1886. "Louis Agas- 
 siz." Eeprinted in LitteWs Living Age ?,, 
 August 14, 1886. Anonymous. This is 
 really a review of Mrs. Agassiz's book, 
 but it is so well and sympathetically 
 
152 BIBLIOGEAPHY 
 
 written that it might also rank as a 
 much abridged version of her work. 
 
 VIII. BECOLLECTIONS OF EMINENT 
 MEN. By E. P. Whipple. (Boston: 
 Ticknor & Co., 1887.) This contains a 
 chapter, " Louis Agassiz." 
 
 IX. Popular Science Monthly, April, 
 1892. "AgassizatPenikese." By David 
 Starr Jordan. 
 
 *X. THE LIFE AND WORK OF Louis 
 AGASSIZ. By Charles F. Holder. (Lead- 
 ers in Science Series. New York and 
 London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1893.) 
 This book is very similar in aim to the 
 present volume. It is, however, some- 
 what larger and more inclusive, and is 
 profusely illustrated, Joeing the only Life 
 which specially considers the tastes of 
 younger readers. 
 
 *XI. LIFE, LETTERS, AND WORKS OF 
 Louis AGASSIZ. By Jules Marcou. 2 
 volumes. (London and New York, 
 1896 : Macmillan & Co.) 
 
BIBLIOGEAPHY 153 
 
 XII. The American Naturalist for 
 March, 1898 (the fiftieth anniversary of 
 Agassiz 7 s entrance on the duties of his 
 Harvard professorship), is given up to 
 seven articles upon Agassiz. 
 
 To this catalogue of volumes and articles 
 is added, 
 
 XIII. A SHOUT LIST OF VERSES CON- 
 CERNING AGASSIZ. 
 
 (a) " Agassiz. 77 By James Eussell 
 Lowell. A long memorial ode. 
 (Z>) "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz.' 7 
 By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
 (<?) "Noel. 77 By Henry Wadsworth 
 Longfellow. French verses sent to Agas- 
 siz, with a gift of wine, on Christmas 
 Eve of 1864. Fifty copies of a trans- 
 lation by John E. Norcross were printed 
 in Philadelphia in 1867 (Kingwalt & 
 Brown). 
 
 (d) "Three Friends of Mine. 77 By 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A series 
 of four sonnets in memory of Felton, 
 
THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES. 
 
 The following volumes are issued : 
 
 Louis Agassiz, by ALICE BACHE GOULD. 
 Phillips Brooks, by the EDITOR. 
 John Brown, by JOSEPH EDGAR CHAMBERLIN. 
 Aaron Burr, by HENRY CHILDS MERWIN. 
 James Fenimore Cooper, by W. B. SHUBRICK CLYMER. 
 Stephen Decatur, by CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY. 
 Frederick Douglass, by CHARLES W. CHESTNUTT. 
 David G. Farragut, by JAMES BARNES. 
 Alysses S. Grant, by OWEN WISTER. 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Mrs. JAMES T. FIELDS. 
 Father Hecker, by HENRY D. SEDGWICK. 
 Sam Houston, by SARAH BARNWELL ELLIOTT. 
 "Stonewall" Jackson, by CARL HOVEY. 
 Thomas Jefferson, by Hon. THOMAS E. WATSON. 
 Robert E. Lee, by WILLIAM P. TRENT. 
 James Russell Lowell, by EDWARD EVERETT HALE, Jr. 
 Thomas Paine, by ELLERY SEDGWIOK. 
 Daniel Webster, by NORMAN HAPGOOD. 
 % 
 
 The following are among those in preparation: 
 
 John James Audubon, by JOHN BURROUGHS. 
 Edwin Booth, by CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND. 
 Benjamin Franklin, by LINDSAY SWIFT. 
 Ulexander Hamilton, by JAMES SCHOULER. 
 
Henry W. Longfellow, by GEORGE RICE CARPENTER. 
 S. F. B. Morse, by JOHN TROWBRIDGE. 
 J. G. Whittier, by RICHARD BURTON. 
 
 THE WESTMINSTER BIOG- 
 RAPHIES. 
 
 The WESTMINSTER BIOGRAPHIES are uniform in plan, 
 size, and general make-up with the BEACON BIOGRAPHIES, 
 the point of important difference lying in the fact that 
 they deal with the lives of eminent Englishmen instead 
 r of with those of eminent Americans. They are bound in 
 limp red cloth, are gilt-topped, and have a cover design and 
 a vignette title-page by BERTRAM GROSVENOR GOODHUE. 
 
 The following volumes are issued: 
 
 Robert Browning, by ARTHUR WAUGH. 
 Daniel Defoe, by WILFRED WHITTEN. 
 Adam Duncan, by H. W. WILSON. 
 John Wesley, by FRANK BANFIELD. 
 
 Many others are in preparation. 
 
 SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers, 
 6 BEACON STREET, BOSTON. 
 
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