world.
In the summer of 1848 Agassiz organized an expedition entirely after his own heart, inasmuch as it combined education with observation in the field. The younger portion of the party consisted of several of his special pupils, and a few other Harvard students who joined the expedition from general interest. Beside these, there were several volunteer members, who were either naturalists or had been attracted to the undertaking by their love of nature and travel. Their object was the examination of the eastern and northern shores of Lake Superior from Sault Ste. Marie to Fort William, a region then little known to science or to tourists. Agassiz taught along the road. At evening, around the camp-fire, or when delayed by weather or untoward circumstances, he would give to his companions short and informal lectures, it might be on the forest about them, or on the erratic phenomena in the immediate neighborhood,–on the terraces of the lake shore, or on the fish of its waters. His lecture-room, in short, was everywhere; his apparatus a traveling blackboard and a bit of chalk; while his illustrations and specimens lay all around him, wherever the party chanced to be.
To Agassiz himself the expedition was of the deepest interest. Glacial phenomena had, as we have seen, met him at every turn since his arrival in the United States, but nowhere had he found them in greater distinctness than on the shores of Lake Superior. As the evidence accumulated about him, he became more than ever satisfied that the power which had modeled and grooved the rocks all over the country, and clothed it with a sheet of loose material reaching to the sea, must have been the same which had left like traces in Europe. In a continent of wide plains and unbroken surfaces, and, therefore, with few centres of glacial action, the phenomena were more widely and uniformly scattered than in Europe. But their special details, down to the closest minutiae, were the same, while their definite circumscription and evenness of distribution forbade the idea of currents or floods as the moving cause. Here, as elsewhere, Agassiz recognized at once the comprehensive scope of the phenomena. The whole history reconstructed itself in his mind, to the time when a sheet of ice clothed the land, reaching the Atlantic sea-board, as it now does the coast of Spitzbergen and the Arctic shores.
He made also a careful survey of the local geology of Lake Superior, and especially of the system of dykes, by the action of which he found that its bed had been excavated, and the outline of its shores determined. But perhaps the inhabitants of the lake itself occupied him even more than its conformation or its surrounding features. Not only for its own novelty and variety, but for its bearing on the geographical distribution of animals, the fauna of this great sheet of fresh water interested him deeply. On this journey he saw at Niagara for the first time a living gar-pike, the only representative among modern fishes of the fossil type of Lepidosteus. From this type he had learned more perhaps than from any other, of the relations between the past and the present fishes. When a student of nineteen years of age, his first sight of a stuffed skin of a gar-pike in the Museum of Carlsruhe told him that it stood alone among living fishes. Its true alliance with the Lepidosteus of the early geological ages became clear to him only later in his study of the fossil fishes. He then detected the reptilian character of the type, and saw that from the articulation of the vertebrae the head must have moved more freely on the trunk than that of any fish of our days. To his great delight, when the first living specimen of the gar-pike, or modern Lepidosteus, was brought to him, it moved its head to the right and left and upward, as a Saurian does and as no other fish can.
The result of this expedition was a valuable collection of fishes and a report upon the fauna and the geology of Lake Superior, comprising the erratic phenomena. A narrative written by James Elliot Cabot formed the introduction to the report, and it was also accompanied by two or three shorter contributions on special subjects from other members of the party. The volume was illustrated by a number of plates exquisitely drawn and colored on stone by A. Sonrel.
This was not Agassiz’s first publication in America. His “Principles of Zoology” (Agassiz and Gould) was published in 1848. The book had a large sale, especially for schools. Edition followed edition, but the sale of the first part was checked by the want of the second, which was never printed. Agassiz was always swept along so rapidly by the current of his own activity that he was sometimes forced to leave behind him unfinished work. Before the time came for the completion of the second part of the zoology, his own knowledge had matured so much, that to be true to the facts, he must have remodeled the whole of the first part, and for this he never found the time. Apropos of these publications the following letters are in place.
FROM SIR RODERICK MURCHISON.
BELGRAVE SQUARE, October 3, 1849.
. . .I thank you very sincerely for your most captivating general work on the “Principles of Zoology.” I am quite in love with it. I was glad to find that you had arranged the nummulites with the tertiary rocks, so that the broad generalization I attempted in my last work on the Alps, Apennines, and Carpathians is completely sustained zoologically, and you will not be sorry to see the stratigraphical truth vindicated (versus E. de Beaumont and–). I beseech you to look at my memoir, and especially at my reasoning about the miocene and pliocene divisions of the Alps and Italy. It seems to me manifest that the percentage system derived from marine life can never be applied to tertiary TERRESTRIAL successions. . .
My friends have congratulated me much on this my last effort, and as Lyell and others most interested in opposing me have been forward in approval, I begin to hope that I am not yet quite done up; and that unlike the Bishop of Oviedo, my last sermon “ne sent pas de l’apoplexie.” I have, nevertheless, been desperately out of sorts and full of gout and liver and all kinds of irritation this summer, which is the first for many a long year in which I have been unable to take the field. The meeting at Birmingham, however, revived me. Professor W. Rogers will have told you all about our doings. Buckland is up to his neck in “sewage,” and wishes to change all underground London into a fossil cloaca of pseudo coprolites. This does not quite suit the chemists charged with sanitary responsibilities; for they fear the Dean will poison half the population in preparing his choice manures! But in this as in everything he undertakes there is a grand sweeping view.
When are we to meet again? And when are we to have a “stand-up fight” on the erratics of the Alps? You will see by the abstract of my memoir appended to my Alpine affair that I have taken the field against the extension of the Jura! In a word, I do not believe that great trunk glaciers ever filled the valleys of the Rhone, etc. Perhaps you will be present at our next meeting of the British Association at Edinburgh, August, 1850. Olim meminisse juvabit! and then, my dear and valued and most enlightened friend, we may study once more together the surface of my native rocks for “auld lang syne.”. . .
FROM CHARLES DARWIN.
DOWN, FARNBOROUGH, KENT, June 15 [1850, probably].
MY DEAR SIR,
I have seldom been more deeply gratified than by receiving your most kind present of “Lake Superior.” I had heard of it, and had much wished to read it, but I confess it was the very great honor of having in my possession a work with your autograph, as a presentation copy, that has given me such lively and sincere pleasure. I cordially thank you for it. I have begun to read it with uncommon interest, which I see will increase as I go on.
The Cirripedia, which you and Dr. Gould were so good as to send me, have proved of great service to me. The sessile species from Massachusetts consist of five species. . .Of the genus Balanus, on the shores of Britain, we have ONE species (B. perforata Bruguiere), which you have not in the United States, in the same way as you exclusively have B. eburneus. All the above species attain a somewhat larger average size on the shores of the United States than on those of Britain, but the specimens from the glacial beds of Uddevalla, Scotland, and Canada, are larger even than those of the United States.
Once again allow me to thank you with cordiality for the pleasure you have given me.
Believe me, with the highest respect, your truly obliged,
C. DARWIN.
The following letter from Hugh Miller concerning Agassiz’s intention of introducing “The Footprints of the Creator” to the American public by a slight memoir of Miller is of interest here. It is to be regretted that with this exception no letters have been found from him among Agassiz’s papers, though he must have been in frequent correspondence with him, and they had, beside their scientific sympathy, a very cordial personal relation.
EDINBURGH, 2 STUART STREET, May 25, 1850.
DEAR SIR,
I was out of town when your kind letter reached here, and found such an accumulation of employment on my return that it is only now I find myself able to devote half an hour to the work of reply, and to say how thoroughly sensible I am of the honor you propose doing me. It never once crossed my mind when, in writing my little volume, the “Footprints,” I had such frequent occasion to refer to my master, our great authority in ichthyic history, that he himself would have associated his name with it on the other side of the Atlantic, and referred in turn to its humble writer.
In the accompanying parcel I send you two of my volumes, which you may not yet have seen, and in which you may find some materials for your proposed introductory memoir. At all events they may furnish you with amusement in a leisure hour. The bulkier of the two, “Scenes and Legends,” of which a new edition has just appeared, and of which the first edition was published, after lying several years beside me, in 1835, is the earliest of my works to which I attached my name. It forms a sort of traditionary history of a district of Scotland, about two hundred miles distant from the capital, in which the character of the people has been scarce at all affected by the cosmopolitanism which has been gradually modifying and altering it in the larger towns; and as it has been frequently remarked,–I know not with what degree of truth,–that there is a closer resemblance between the Scotch and Swiss than between any other two peoples of Europe, you may have some interest in determining whether the features of your own country-folk are not sometimes to be seen in those of mine, as exhibited in my legendary history. Certainly both countries had for many ages nearly the same sort of work to do; both had to maintain a long and ultimately successful war of independence against nations greatly more powerful than themselves; and as their hills produced little else than the “soldier and his sword,” both had to make a trade abroad of that art of war which they were compelled in self-defense to acquire at home. Even in the laws of some nations we find them curiously enough associated together. In France, under the old regime, the personal property of all strangers dying in the country, SWISS AND SCOTS EXCEPTED, was forfeited to the king.
The other volume, “First Impressions of England and its People,” contains some personal anecdotes and some geology. But the necessary materials you will chiefly find in the article from the “North British Review” which I also inclose. It is from the pen of Sir David Brewster, with whom for the last ten years I have spent a few very agreeable days every year at Christmas, under the roof of a common friend,–one of the landed proprietors of Fifeshire. Sir David’s estimate of the writer is, I fear, greatly too high, but his statement of facts regarding him is correct; and I think you will find it quite full enough for the purposes of a brief memoir. With his article I send you one of my own, written about six years ago for the same periodical, as the subject is one in which, from its connection with your master study,–the natural history of fishes,–you may take more interest than most men. It embodies, from observation, what may be regarded as THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FISHERMAN, and describes some curious scenes and appearances which I witnessed many years ago when engaged, during a truant boyhood, in prosecuting the herring fishery as an amateur. Many of my observations of natural phenomena date from this idle, and yet not wholly wasted, period of my life.
With the volumes I send also a few casts of my less fragile specimens of Asterolepis. Two of the number, those of the external and internal surfaces of the creature’s cranial buckler, are really very curious combinations of plates, and when viewed in a slant light have a decidedly sculpturesque and not ungraceful effect. I have seen on our rustic tombstones worse representations of angels, winged and robed, than that formed by the central plates of the interior surface when the light is made to fall along their higher protuberances, leaving the hollows in the shade. You see how truly your prediction regarding the flatness of the creature’s head is substantiated by these casts; it is really not easy to know how, placed on so flat a surface, the eyes could have been very available save for star-gazing; but as nature makes no mistakes in such matters, it is possible that the creature, like the flatfishes, may have lived much at the bottom, and that most of the seeing it had use for may have been seeing in an upward direction. None of my other specimens of bucklers are so entire and in so good a state of keeping as the two from which I have taken the casts, but they are greatly larger. One specimen, nearly complete, exhibits an area about four times as great as the largest of these two, and I have fragments of others which must have belonged to fish still more gigantic. The two other casts are of specimens of gill covers, which in the Asterolepis, as in the sturgeon, consisted each of a single plate. In both the exterior surface of the buckler and of the operculum the tubercles are a good deal enveloped in the stone, which is of a consistency too hard to be removed without injuring what it overlies; but you will find them in the smaller cast which accompanies the others, and which, as shown by the thickness of the plate in the original, indicates their size and form in a large individual, very characteristically shown. So coral-like is their aspect, that if it was from such a cast, not a fossil (which would, of course, exhibit the peculiarities of the bone), that Lamarck founded his genus Monticularia, I think his apology for the error might almost be maintained as good. I am sorry I cannot venture on taking casts from some of my other specimens; but they are exceedingly fragile, and as they are still without duplicates I am afraid to hazard them. Since publishing my little volume I have got several new plates of Asterolepis,–a broad palatal plate, covered with tubercles, considerably larger than those of the creature’s external surface,–a key-stone shaped plate, placed, when in situ, in advance of the little plate between the eyes, which form the head and face of the effigy in the centre of the buckler,–and a side-plate, into which the condyloid processes of the lower jaw were articulated, and which exhibited the processes on which these hinged. There are besides some two or three plates more, whose places I have still to find. The small cast, stained yellow, is taken from an instructive specimen of the jaws of coccosteus, and exhibits a peculiarity which I had long suspected and referred to in the first edition of my volume on the Old Red Sandstone in rather incautious language, but which a set of my specimens now fully establishes. Each of the under jaws of the fish was furnished with two groups of teeth: one group in the place where, in quadrupeds, we usually find the molars; and another group in the line of the symphyses. And how these both could have acted is a problem which our anatomists here–many of whom have carefully examined my specimen–seem unable, and in some degree, indeed, afraid to solve.
I have written to the Messrs. Gould, Kendall & Lincoln to say that the third edition of the “Footprints” differs from the first and second only by the addition of a single note and an illustrative diagram, both of which I have inclosed to them in my communication. I anticipate much pleasure from the perusal of your work on Lake Superior, when it comes to hand, which, as your publishers have intrusted it to the care of a gentleman visiting this country, will, I think, be soon. It is not often that a region so remote and so little known as that which surrounds the great lake of America is visited by a naturalist of the first class. From such a terra incognita, at length unveiled to eyes so discerning, I anticipate strange tidings.
I am, my dear sir, with respect and admiration, very truly yours,
HUGH MILLER.
In the spring of 1850 Agassiz married Elizabeth Cabot Cary, daughter of Thomas Graves Cary, of Boston. This marriage confirmed his resolve to remain, at least for the present, in the United States. It connected him by the closest ties with a large family circle, of which he was henceforth a beloved and honored member, and made him the brother-in-law of one of his most intimate friends in Cambridge, Professor C.C. Felton. Thus secure of favorable conditions for the care and education of his children, he called them to this country. His son (then a lad of fifteen years of age) had joined him the previous summer. His daughters, younger by several years than their brother, arrived the following autumn, and home built itself up again around him.
The various foreign members of his household had already scattered. One or two had returned to Europe, others had settled here in permanent homes of their own. Among the latter were Professor Guyot and M. de Pourtales, who remained, both as scientific colleagues and personal friends, very near and dear to him all his life. “Papa Christinat” had also withdrawn. While Agassiz was absent on a lecturing tour, the kind old man, knowing well the opposition he should meet, and wishing to save both himself and his friend the pain of parting, stole away without warning and went to New Orleans, where he had obtained a place as pastor. This was a great disappointment to Agassiz, who had urged him to make his home with him, a plan in which his wife and children cordially concurred, but which did not approve itself to the judgment of his old friend. M. Christinat afterward returned to Switzerland, where he ended his days. He wrote constantly until his death, and was always kept advised of everything that passed in the family at Cambridge. Of the old household, Mr. Burkhardt alone remained a permanent member of the new one.
CHAPTER 16.
1850-1852: AGE 43-45.
Proposition from Dr. Bache.
Exploration of Florida Reefs.
Letter to Humboldt concerning Work in America. Appointment to Professorship of Medical College in Charleston, S.C. Life at the South.
Views concerning Races of Men.
Prix Cuvier.
THE following letter from the Superintendent of the Coast Survey determined for Agassiz the chief events of the winter of 1851.
FROM ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE.
WEBB’S HILL, October 30, 1850.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
Would it be possible for you to devote six weeks or two months to the examination of the Florida reefs and keys in connection with their survey? It is extremely important to ascertain what they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal during the time you were on the reef, say six weeks.
The changes at or near Cape Florida, from the Atlantic coast and its siliceous sand, to the Florida coast and its coral sand, must be curious. You will be free to move from one end of the reef to the other, which will be, say one hundred and fifty miles. Motion to eastward would be slow in the windy season, though favored by the Gulf Stream as the winds are “trade.” Whatever collections you might make would be your own. I would only ask for the survey such information and such specimens as would be valuable to its operations, especially to its hydrography, and some report on these matters. As this will, if your time and engagements permit, lead to a business arrangement, I must, though reluctantly, enter into that. I will put aside six hundred dollars for the two months, leaving you to pay your own expenses; or, if you prefer it, will pay all expenses of travel, including subsistence, to and from Key West, and furnish vessel and subsistence while there, and four hundred dollars.
What results would flow to science from your visit to that region! You have spoken of the advantage of using our vessels when they were engaged in their own work. Now I offer you a vessel the motions of which you will control, and the assistance of the officers and crew of which you will have. You shall be at no expense for going and coming, or while there, and shall choose your own time. . .
Agassiz accepted this proposal with delight, and at once made arrangements to take with him a draughtsman and an assistant, in order to give the expedition such a character as would make it useful to science in general, as well as to the special objects of the Coast Survey. It will be seen that Dr. Bache gladly concurred in all these views.
FROM ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE.
WASHINGTON, December 18, 1850.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
On the basis of our former communications I have been, as the time served, raising a superstructure. I have arranged with Lieutenant Commander Alden to send the schooner W.A. Graham, belonging to the Coast Survey, under charge of an officer who will take an interest in promoting the great objects in which you will be engaged, to Key West, in time to meet you on your arrival in the Isabel of the 15th, from Charleston to Key West. The vessel will be placed at your absolute disposal for four to six weeks, as you may find desirable, doing just such things as you require, and going to such places as you direct. If you desire more than a general direction, I will give any specific ones which you may suggest. . .
I have requested that room be made in the cabin for you and for two aids, as you desire to take a draughtsman with you; and in reference to your enlarged plan of operating, of which I see the advantage, I have examined the financial question, and propose to add two hundred dollars to the six hundred in my letter of October 30th, to enable you to execute it. I would suggest that you stop a day in Washington on your way to Charleston, to pick up the topographical and geographical information which you desire, and to have all matters of a formal kind arranged to suit your convenience and wishes, which, I am sure, will all be promotive of the objects in view from your visit to Florida. . .You say I shall smile AT your plans,–instead of which, they have been smiled ON; now, there is a point for you,–a true Saxon distinction.
If you succeed (and did you ever fail!?) in developing for our Coast Survey the nature, structure, growth, and all that, of the Florida reefs, you will have conferred upon the country a priceless favor. . .
The Superintendent of the Coast Survey never had cause to regret the carte-blanche he had thus given. A few weeks, with the facilities so liberally afforded, gave Agassiz a clew to all the phenomena he had been commissioned to examine, and enabled him to explain the relation between the keys and the outer and inner reefs, and the mud swamps, or more open channels, dividing them, and to connect these again with the hummocks and everglades of the main-land. It remains to be seen whether his theory will hold good, that the whole or the greater part of the Florida peninsula has, like its southern portion, been built up of concentric reefs. But his explanation of the present reefs, their structure, laws of growth, relations to each other and to the main-land, as well as to the Gulf Stream and its prevailing currents, was of great practical service to the Coast Survey. It was especially valuable in determining how far the soil now building up from accumulations of mud and coral debris was likely to remain for a long time shifting and uncertain, and how far and in what localities it might be relied upon as affording a stable foundation. When, at the meeting of the American Association in the following spring, Agassiz gave an account of his late exploration, Dr. Bache, who was present, said that for the first time he understood the bearing of the whole subject, though he had so long been trying to unravel it.
The following letter was written immediately after Agassiz’s return.
TO SIR CHARLES LYELL.
CAMBRIDGE, April 26, 1851.
. . .I have spent a large part of the winter in Florida, with a view of studying the coral reefs. I have found that they constitute a new class of reefs, distinct from those described by Darwin and Dana under the name of fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and atolls. I have lately read a paper upon that subject before the American Academy, which I shall send you as soon as it is printed. The case is this. There are several concentric reefs separated by deep channels; the peninsula of Florida itself is a succession of such reefs, the everglades being the filled-up channels, while the hummocks were formerly little intervening islands, like the mangrove islands in the present channels. But what is quite remarkable, all these concentric reefs are upon one level, above that of the sea, and there is no indication whatever of upheaval. You will find some observations upon upheavals, etc., in Silliman, by Tuomey; it is a great mistake, as I shall show. The Tortugas are a real atoll, but formed without the remotest indication of subsidence.
Of course this does not interfere in the least with the views of Darwin, for the whole ground presents peculiar features. I wish you would tell him something about this. One of the most remarkable peculiarities of the rocks in the reefs of the Tortugas consists in their composition; they are chiefly made up of CORALLINES, limestone algae, and, to a small extent only, of real corals. . .
Agassiz’s report to the Coast Survey upon the results of this first investigation made by him upon the reefs of Florida was not published in full at the time. The parts practically most important to the Coast Survey were incorporated in their subsequent charts; the more general scientific results, as touching the physical history of the peninsula as a whole, appeared in various forms, were embodied in Agassiz’s lectures, and were printed some years after in his volume entitled “Methods of Study.” The original report, with all the plates prepared for it, was published in the “Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology,” under the supervision of Alexander Agassiz, after the death of his father. It forms a quarto volume, containing some sixty pages of text, with twenty-two plates, illustrative of corals and coral structure, and a map of Southern Florida with its reefs and keys.
This expedition was also of great importance to Agassiz’s collections, and to the embryo museum in Cambridge. It laid the foundation of a very complete collection of corals of all varieties and in all stages of growth. All the specimens, from huge coral heads and branching fans down to the most minute single corals, were given up to him, the value of the whole being greatly enhanced by the drawings taken on the spot from the living animals.
To this period belongs also the following fragment of a letter to Humboldt.
TO ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.
[Probably 1852,–date not given.]
. . .What a time has passed since my last letter! Had you not been constantly in my thoughts, and your counsels always before me as my guide, I should reproach myself for my silence. I hope my two papers on the medusae, forwarded this year, have reached you, and also one upon the classification of insects, as based upon their development. I have devoted myself especially to the organization of the invertebrate animals, and to the facts bearing upon the perfecting of their classification. I have succeeded in tracing the same identity of structure between the three classes of radiates, and also between those of mollusks, as has already been recognized in the vertebrates, and partially in the articulates. It is truly a pleasure for me now to be able to demonstrate in my lectures the insensible gradations existing between polyps, medusae, and echinoderms, and to designate by the same name organs seemingly so different. Especially has the minute examination of the thickness of the test in echinoderms revealed to me unexpected relations between the sea-urchin and the medusa. No one suspects, I fancy, at this moment, that the solid envelope of the Scutellae and the Clypeasters is traversed by a net-work of radiating tubes, corresponding to those of the medusae, so well presented by Ehrenberg in Aurelia aurita. If the Berlin zoologists will take the trouble to file off the surface of the test of an Echinarachnius parma, they will find a circular canal as large and as continuous as that of the medusae. The aquiferous tubes specified above open into this canal. But the same thing may be found under various modifications in other genera of the family. Since I have succeeded in injecting colored liquid into the beroids, for instance, and keeping them alive with it circulating in their transparent mass, I am able to show the identity of their zones of locomotive fringes (combs), from which they take their name of Ctenophorae, with the ambulacral (locomotive) apparatus of the echinoderms. Furnished with these facts, it is not difficult to recognize true beroidal forms in the embryos of sea-urchins and star-fishes, published by Muller in his beautiful plates, and thus to trace the medusoid origin of the echinoderms, as the polypoid origin of the medusae has already been recognized. I do not here allude to their primitive origin, but simply to the general fact that among radiates the embryos of the higher classes represent, in miniature, types of the lower classes, as, for instance, those of the echinoderms resemble the medusae, those of the medusae the polyps. Having passed the greater part of last winter in Florida, where I was especially occupied in studying the coral reefs, I had the best opportunity in the world for prosecuting my embryological researches upon the stony corals. I detected relations among them which now enable me to determine the classification of these animals according to their mode of development with greater completeness than ever before, and even to assign a superior or inferior rank to their different types, agreeing with their geological succession, as I have already done for the fishes. I am on the road to the same results for the mollusks and the articulates, and can even now say in general terms, that the most ancient representatives of all the families belonging to these great groups, strikingly recall the first phases in the embryonic development of their successors in more recent formations, and even that the embryos of comparatively recent families recall families belonging to ancient epochs. You will find some allusion to these results in my Lectures on Embryology, given in my “Lake Superior,” of which I have twice sent you a copy, that it might reach you the more surely; but these first impressions have assumed greater coherence now, and I constantly find myself recurring to my fossils for light upon the embryonic forms I am studying and vice versa, consulting my embryological drawings in order to decipher the fossils with greater certainty.
The proximity of the sea and the ease with which I can visit any part of the coast within a range of some twenty degrees give me inexhaustible resources for the whole year, which, as time goes on, I turn more and more to the best account. On the other hand, the abundance and admirable state of preservation of the fossils found in our ancient deposits, as well as the regular succession of the beds containing them, contribute admirable material for this kind of comparative study. . .
In the summer of 1851 Agassiz was invited to a professorship at the Medical College in Charleston, S.C. This was especially acceptable to him, because it substituted a regular course of instruction to students, for the disconnected lectures given to miscellaneous audiences, in various parts of the country, by which he was obliged to eke out his small salary and provide for his scientific expenses. While more fatiguing than class-room work, these scattered lectures had a less educational value, though, on the other hand, they awakened a very wide-spread interest in the study of nature. The strain of constant traveling for this purpose, the more harassing because so unfavorable to his habits of continuous work, had already told severely upon his health; and from this point of view also the new professorship was attractive, as promising a more quiet, though no less occupied, life. The lectures were to be given during the three winter months, thus occupying the interval between his autumn and spring courses at Cambridge.
He assumed his new duties at Charleston in December, 1851, and by the kindness of his friend Mrs. Rutledge, who offered him the use of her cottage for the purpose, he soon established a laboratory on Sullivan’s Island, where the two or three assistants he had brought with him could work conveniently. The cottage stood within hearing of the wash of the waves, at the head of the long, hard sand beach which fringed the island shore for some three or four miles. There could hardly be a more favorable position for a naturalist, and there, in the midst of their specimens, Agassiz and his band of workers might constantly be found. His studies here were of the greater interest to him because they connected themselves with his previous researches, not only upon the fishes, but also upon the lower marine animals of the coast of New England and of the Florida reefs; so that he had now a basis for comparison of the fauna scattered along the whole Atlantic coast of the United States. The following letter gives some idea of his work at this time.
TO PROFESSOR JAMES D. DANA.
CHARLESTON, January 26, 1852.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
You should at least know that I think of you often on these shores. And how could I do otherwise when I daily find new small crustacea, which remind me of the important work you are now preparing on that subject.
Of course, of the larger ones there is nothing to be found after Professor Gibbes has gone over the ground, but among the lower orders there are a great many in store for a microscopic observer. I have only to regret that I cannot apply myself more steadily. I find my nervous system so over-excited that any continuous exertion makes me feverish. So I go about as much as the weather allows, and gather materials for better times.
Several interesting medusae have been already observed; among others, the entire metamorphosis and alternate generation of a new species of my genus tiaropsis. You will be pleased to know that here, as well as at the North, tiaropsis is the medusa of a campanularia. Mr. Clark, one of my assistants, has made very good drawings of all its stages of growth, and of various other hydroid medusae peculiar to this coast. Mr. Stimpson, another very promising young naturalist, who has been connected with me for some time in the same capacity, draws the crustacea and bryozoa, of which there are also a good many new ones here. My son and my old friend Burkhardt are also with me (upon Sullivan’s Island), and they look after the larger species, so that I shall probably have greatly increased my information upon the fauna of the Atlantic coast by the time I return to Cambridge.
In town, where I go three times a week to deliver lectures at the Medical College (beside a course just now in the evening also before a mixed audience), I have the rest of my family, so that nothing would be wanting to my happiness if my health were only better. . .What a pity that a man cannot work as much as he would like; or at least accomplish what he aims at. But no doubt it is best it should be so; there is no harm in being compelled by natural necessities to limit our ambition,–on the contrary, the better sides of our nature are thus not allowed to go to sleep. However, I cannot but regret that I am unable at this time to trace more extensively subjects for which I should have ample opportunities here, as for instance the anatomy of the echinoderms, and also the embryology of the lower animals in general. . .
This winter, notwithstanding the limitations imposed upon his work by the state of his health, was a very happy one to Agassiz. As mentioned in the above letter his wife and daughters had accompanied him to Charleston, and were established there in lodgings. Their holidays and occasional vacations were passed at the house of Dr. John E. Holbrook (the “Hollow Tree”), an exquisitely pretty and picturesque country place in the neighborhood of Charleston. Here Agassiz had been received almost as one of the family on his first visit to Charleston, shortly after his arrival in the United States. Dr. Holbrook’s name, as the author of the “Herpetology of South Carolina,” had long been familiar to him, and he now found a congenial and affectionate friend in the colleague and fellow-worker, whose personal acquaintance he had been anxious to make. Dr. Holbrook’s wife, a direct descendant of John Rutledge of our revolutionary history, not only shared her husband’s intellectual life, but had herself rare mental qualities, which had been developed by an unusually complete and efficient education. The wide and various range of her reading, the accuracy of her knowledge in matters of history and literature, and the charm of her conversation, made her a delightful companion. She exercised the most beneficent influence upon her large circle of young people, and without any effort to attract, she drew to herself whatever was most bright and clever in the society about her. The “Hollow Tree,” presided over by its hospitable host and hostess was, therefore, the centre of a stimulating and cultivated social intercourse, free from all gene or formality. Here Agassiz and his family spent many happy days during their southern sojourn of 1852. The woods were yellow with jessamine, and the low, deep piazza was shut in by vines and roses; the open windows and the soft air full of sweet, out-of-door fragrance made one forget, spite of the wood fire on the hearth, that it was winter by the calendar. The days, passed almost wholly in the woods or on the veranda, closed with evenings spent not infrequently in discussions upon the scientific ideas and theories of the day, carried often beyond the region of demonstrated facts into that of speculative thought. An ever-recurring topic was that of the origin of the human race. It was Agassiz’s declared belief that man had sprung not from a common stock, but from various centres, and that the original circumscription of these primordial groups of the human family corresponded in a large and general way with the distribution of animals and their combination into faunae. * (* See “Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and their Relation to the Different Types of Man” included in Nott & Gliddon’s “Types of Mankind”.) His special zoological studies were too engrossing to allow him to follow this line of investigation closely, but it was never absent from his view of the animal kingdom as a whole. He valued extremely Mrs. Holbrook’s thoughtful sympathy, and as the following letter connects itself with the winter evening talks by the “Hollow Tree” fireside, and was suggested by them, it may be given here, though in date it is a little in advance of the present chapter.
TO MRS. HOLBROOK.
CAMBRIDGE, July, 1852.
. . .I am again working at the human races, and have opened another line of investigation in that direction. The method followed by former investigators does not seem to me to have been altogether the best, since there is so little agreement between them. The difficulty has, no doubt, arisen on one side from the circumstance that the inquirer sought for evidence of the unity of all races, expecting the result to agree with the prevailing interpretation of Genesis; and on the other from too zoological a point of view in weighing the differences observed. Again, both have almost set aside all evidence not directly derived from the examination of the races themselves. It has occurred to me that as a preliminary inquiry we ought to consider the propriety of applying to man the same rules as to animals, examining the limits within which they obtain, and paying due attention to all circumstances bearing upon the differences observed among men, from whatever quarter in the study of nature they may be gathered. What do the monkeys say to this? or, rather, what have they to tell in reference to it? There are among them as great, and, indeed, even greater, differences than among men, for they are acknowledged to constitute different genera, and are referred to many, indeed to more than a hundred, species; but they are the nearest approach to the human family, and we may at least derive some hints from them. How much mixture there is among these species, if any, is not at all ascertained; indeed, we have not the least information respecting their intercourse; but one point is certain,–zoologists agree as little among themselves respecting the limits of these species as they do respecting the affinities of the races of men. What some consider as distinct species, others consider as mere varieties, and these varieties or species differ in particulars neither more constant nor more important than those which distinguish the human races. The fact that they are arranged in different genera, species, and varieties does not lessen the value of the comparison; for the point in question is just to know whether nations, races, and what have also been called families of men, such as the Indo-Germanic, the Semitic, etc., do not in reality correspond to the families, genera, and species of monkeys. Now the first great subdivisions among the true monkeys (excluding Makis and Arctopitheci) are founded upon the form of the nose, those of the new world having a broad partition between the nostrils, while those of the old world have it narrow. How curious that this fact, which has been known to naturalists for half a century, as presenting a leading feature among monkeys, should have been overlooked in man, when, in reality, the negroes and Australians differ in precisely the same manner from the other races; they having a broad partition, and nostrils opening sideways, like the monkeys of South America, while the other types of the human family have a narrow partition and nostrils opening downward, like the monkeys of Asia and Africa. Again, the minor differences, such as the obliquity of the anterior teeth, the thickness of the lips, the projection of the cheek-bones, the position of the eyes, the characteristic hair, or wool, afford as constant differences as those by which the chimpanzees, orangs, and gibbons are separated into distinct genera; and their respective species differ no more than do the Greeks, Germans, and Arabs,–or the Chinese, Tartars, and Finns, –or the New Zealanders and Malays, which are respectively referred to the same race. The truth is, that the different SPECIES admitted by some among the orangs are in reality RACES among monkeys, or else the races among men are nothing more than what are called species among certain monkeys. . .Listen for a moment to the following facts, and when you read this place a map of the world before you. Upon a narrow strip of land along the Gulf of Guinea, from Cape Palmas to the Gaboon, live two so-called species of chimpanzee; upon the islands of Sumatra and Borneo live three or four orangs; upon the shores of the Gulf of Bengal, including the neighborhood of Calcutta, Burmah, Malacca, Sumatra, Borneo, and Java together, ten or eleven species of gibbons, all of which are the nearest relatives to the human family, some being as large as certain races of men; altogether, fifteen species of anthropoid monkeys playing their part in the animal population of the world upon an area not equaling by any means the surface of Europe. Some of these species are limited to Borneo, others to Sumatra, others to Java alone, others to the peninsula of Malacca; that is to say to tracts of land similar in extent to Spain, France, Italy, and even to Ireland; distinct animals, considered by most naturalists as distinct species, approaching man most closely in structural eminence and size, limited to areas not larger than Spain or Italy. Why, then, should not the primitive theatre of a nation of men have been circumscribed within similar boundaries, and from the beginning have been as independent as the chimpanzee of Guinea, or the orangs of Borneo and Sumatra? Of course, the superior powers of man have enabled him to undertake migrations, but how limited are these, and how slight the traces they have left behind them. . . Unfortunately for natural history, history so-called has recorded more faithfully the doings of handfuls of adventurers than the real history of the primitive nations with whom the migrating tribes came into contact. But I hope it will yet be possible to dive under these waves of migration, to remove, as it were, the trace of their passage, and to read the true history of the past inhabitants of the different parts of the world, when it will be found, if all analogies are not deceptive, that every country equaling in extent those within the limits of which distinct nationalities are known to have played their part in history, has had its distinct aborigines, the character of which it is now the duty of naturalists to restore, if it be not too late, in the same manner as paleontologists restore fossil remains. I have already made some attempts, by studying ancient geography, and I hope the task may yet be accomplished. . .Look, for instance, at Spain. The Iberians are known as the first inhabitants, never extending much beyond the Pyrenees to the Garonne, and along the gulfs of Lyons and Genoa. As early as during the period of Phoenician prosperity they raised wool from their native sheep, derived from the Mouflon, still found wild in Spain, Corsica, and Sardinia; they had a peculiar breed of horses, to this day differing from all other horses in the world. Is this not better evidence of their independent origin, than is the fancied lineage with the Indo-Germanic family of their Oriental descent? For we must not forget, in connection with this, that the Basque language was once the language of all Spain, that which the Iberian spoke, and which has no direct relation to Sanskrit.
I have alluded but slightly to the negro race, and not at all to the Indians. I would only add with reference to these that I begin to perceive the possibility of distinguishing different centres of growth in these two continents. If we leave out of consideration fancied migrations, what connection can be traced, for instance, between the Eskimos, along the whole northern districts of this continent, and the Indians of the United States, those of Mexico, those of Peru, and those of Brazil? Is there any real connection between the coast tribes of the northwest coast, the mound builders, the Aztec civilization, the Inca, and the Gueranis? It seems to me no more than between the Assyrian and Egyptian civilization. And as to negroes, there is, perhaps, a still greater difference between those of Senegal, of Guinea, and the Caffres and Hottentots, when compared with the Gallahs and Mandingoes. But where is the time to be taken for the necessary investigations involved in these inquiries? Pray write to me soon what you say to all this, and believe me always your true friend,
L. AGASSIZ.
In the spring of 1852, while still in Charleston, Agassiz heard that the Prix Cuvier, now given for the first time, was awarded to him for the “Poissons Fossiles.” This gratified him the more because the work had been so directly bequeathed to him by Cuvier himself. To his mother, through whom he received the news in advance of the official papers, it also gave great pleasure. “Your fossil fishes,” she says, “which have cost you so much anxiety, so much toil, so many sacrifices, have now been estimated at their true value by the most eminent judges. . .This has given me such happiness, dear Louis, that the tears are in my eyes as I write it to you.” She had followed the difficulties of his task too closely not to share also its success.
CHAPTER 17.
1852-1855: AGE 45-48.
Return to Cambridge.
Anxiety about Collections.
Purchase of Collections.
Second Winter in Charleston.
Illness.
Letter to James D. Dana concerning Geographical Distribution and Geological Succession of Animals.
Resignation of Charleston Professorship. Propositions from Zurich.
Letter to Oswald Heer.
Decision to remain in Cambridge.
Letters to James D. Dana, S.S. Haldeman, and Others respecting Collections illustrative of the Distribution of Fishes, Shells, etc., in our Rivers.
Establishment of School for Girls.
Agassiz returned from Charleston to Cambridge in the early spring, pausing in Washington to deliver a course of lectures before the Smithsonian Institution. By this time he had become intimate with Professor Henry, at whose hospitable house he and his family were staying during their visit at Washington. He had the warmest sympathy not only with Professor Henry’s scientific work and character, but also with his views regarding the Smithsonian Institution, of which he had become the Superintendent shortly after Agassiz arrived in this country. Agassiz himself was soon appointed one of the Regents of the Institution and remained upon the Board until his death.
Agassiz now began to feel an increased anxiety about his collections. During the six years of his stay in the United States he had explored the whole Atlantic sea-board as well as the lake and river system of the Eastern and Middle States, and had amassed such materials in natural history as already gave his collections, in certain departments at least, a marked importance. In the lower animals, and as illustrating the embryology of the marine invertebrates, they were especially valuable. It had long been a favorite idea with him to build up an embryological department in his prospective museum; the more so because such a provision on any large scale had never been included in the plan of the great zoological institutions, and he believed it would have a direct and powerful influence on the progress of modern science. The collections now in his possession included ample means for this kind of research, beside a fair representation of almost all classes of the animal kingdom. Packed together, however, in the narrowest quarters, they were hardly within his own reach, much less could they be made available for others. His own resources were strained to the utmost, merely to save these precious materials from destruction. It is true that in 1850 the sum of four hundred dollars, to be renewed annually, was allowed him by the University for their preservation, and a barrack-like wooden building on the college grounds, far preferable to the bath-house by the river, was provided for their storage. But the cost of keeping them was counted by thousands, not by hundreds, and the greater part of what Agassiz could make by his lectures outside of Cambridge was swallowed up in this way. It was, perhaps, the knowledge of this which induced certain friends, interested in him and in science, to subscribe twelve thousand dollars for the purchase of his collections, to be thus permanently secured to 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 maintenance and increase.
The next year showed that his over-burdened life was beginning to tell upon his health. Scarcely had he arrived in Charleston and begun his course at the Medical College when he was attacked by a violent fever, and his life was in danger for many days. Fortunately for him his illness occurred at the “Hollow Tree,” where he was passing the Christmas holidays. Dr. and Mrs. Holbrook were like a brother and sister to him, and nothing could exceed the kindness he received under their roof. One young friend who had been his pupil, and to whom he was much attached, Dr. St. Julian Ravenel, was constantly at his bedside. His care was invaluable, for he combined the qualities of physician and nurse. Under such watchful tending, Agassiz could hardly fail to mend if cure were humanly possible. The solicitude of these nearer friends seemed to be shared by the whole community, and his recovery gave general relief. He was able to resume his lectures toward the end of February. Spite of the languor of convalescence his elastic mind was at once ready for work, as may be seen by the following extract from one of his first letters.
TO JAMES D. DANA.
SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, CHARLESTON, February 16, 1853.
. . .It seems, indeed, to me as if in the study of the geographical distribution of animals the present condition of the animal kingdom was too exclusively taken into consideration. Whenever it can be done, and I hope before long it may be done for all classes, it will be desirable to take into account the relations of the living to the fossil species. Since you are as fully satisfied as I am that the location of animals, with all their peculiarities, is not the result of physical influences, but lies within the plans and intentions of the Creator, it must be obvious that the successive introduction of all the diversity of forms which have existed from the first appearance of any given division of the animal kingdom up to the present creation, must have reference to the location of those now in existence. For instance, if it be true among mammalia that the highest types, such as quadrumana, are essentially tropical, may it not be that the prevailing distribution of the inferior pachyderms within the same geographical limits is owing to the circumstance that their type was introduced upon earth during a warmer period in the history of our globe, and that their present location is in accordance with that fact, rather than related to their degree of organization? The pentacrinites, the lowest of the echinoderms, have only one living representative in tropical America, where we find at the same time the highest and largest spatangi and holothuridae. Is this not quite a parallel case with the monkeys and pachyderms? for once crinoids were the only representatives of the class of echinoderms. May we not say the same of crocodiles when compared with the ancient gigantic saurians? or are the crocodiles, as an order, distinct from the other saurians, and really higher than the turtles? Innumerable questions of this kind, of great importance for zoology, are suggested at every step, as soon as we compare the present distribution of animals with that of the inhabitants of former geological periods. Among crustacea, it is very remarkable that trilobites and limulus-like forms are the only representatives of the class during the paleozoic ages; that macrourans prevailed in the same manner during the secondary period; and that brachyurans make their appearance only in the tertiary period. Do you discover in your results any connection between such facts and the present distribution of crustacea? There is certainly one feature in their classification which must appear very striking,–that, taken on a large scale, the organic rank of these animals agrees in the main with their order of succession in geological times; and this fact is of no small importance when it is found that the same correspondence between rank and succession obtains through all classes of the animal kingdom, and that similar features are displayed in the embryonic growth of all types so far as now known.
But I feel my head is growing dull, and I will stop here. Let me conclude by congratulating you on having completed your great work on crustacea. . .
Agassiz returned to the North in the spring of 1853 by way of the Mississippi, stopping to lecture at Mobile, New Orleans, and St. Louis. On leaving Charleston he proffered his resignation with deep regret, for, beside the close personal ties he had formed, he was attached to the place, the people, and to his work there. He had hoped to establish a permanent station for sustained observations in South Carolina, and thus to carry on a series of researches which, taken in connection with his studies on the New England coast and its vicinity, and on the Florida reefs and shores, would afford a wide field of comparison. This was not to be, however. The Medical College refused, indeed, to accept his resignation, granting him, at the same time, a year of absence. But it soon became evident that his health was seriously shaken, and that he needed the tonic of the northern winter. He was, indeed, never afterward as strong as he had been before this illness.
The winter of 1854 was passed in Cambridge with such quiet and rest as the conditions of his life would allow. In May of that year he received an invitation to the recently established University of Zurich, in Switzerland. His acceptance was urged upon the ground of patriotism as well as on that of a liberal endowment both for the professor, and for the museum of which he was to have charge. The offer was tempting, but Agassiz was in love (the word is not too strong) with the work he had undertaken and the hopes he had formed in America. He believed that by his own efforts, combined with the enthusiasm for science which he had aroused and constantly strove to keep alive and foster in the community, he should at last succeed in founding a museum after his own heart in the United States,–a museum which should not be a mere accumulation, however vast or extensive, of objects of natural history, but should have a well-combined and clearly expressed educational value. As we shall see, neither the associations of his early life nor the most tempting scientific prizes in the gift of the old world could divert him from this settled purpose. The proposition from Zurich was not official, but came through a friend and colleague, for whom he had the deepest sympathy and admiration,–Oswald Heer. To work in his immediate neighborhood would have been in itself a temptation.
TO PROFESSOR OSWALD HEER.
CAMBRIDGE, January 9, 1855.
MY HONORED FRIEND,
How shall I make you understand why your kind letter, though it reached me some months ago, has remained till now unanswered. It concerns a decision of vital importance to my whole life, and in such a case one must not decide hastily, nor even with too exclusive regard for one’s own preference in the matter. You cannot doubt that the thought of joining an institution of my native country, and thus helping to stimulate scientific progress in the land of my birth, my home, and my early friends, appeals to all I hold dear and honorable in life. On the other side I have now been eight years in America, have learned to understand the advantages of my position here, and have begun undertakings which are not yet brought to a conclusion. I am aware also how wide an influence I already exert upon this land of the future,–an influence which gains in extent and intensity with every year,–so that it becomes very difficult for me to discern clearly where I can be most useful to science. Among my privileges I must not overlook that of passing much of my time on the immediate sea-shore, where the resources for the zoologist and embryologist are inexhaustible. I have now a house distant only a few steps from an admirable locality for these studies, and can therefore pursue them uninterruptedly throughout the whole year, instead of being limited, like most naturalists, to the short summer vacations. It is true I miss the larger museums, libraries, etc., as well as the stimulus to be derived from association with a number of like-minded co-workers, all striving toward the same end. With every year, however, the number of able and influential investigators increases here, and among them are some who might justly claim a prominent place anywhere. . .
Neither are means for publication lacking. The larger treatises with costly illustrations appear in the Smithsonian Contributions, in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, in those of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and in the Memoirs of the American Academy; while the smaller communications find a place in Silliman’s Journal, in the Journal of the Boston Natural History Society, and in the proceedings of other scientific societies. Museums also are already founded;. . .and beside these there are a number of private collections in single departments of zoology. . . Better than all this, however, is the lively and general interest taken in the exploration of the country itself. Every scientific expedition sent out by the government to the interior, or to the Western States of Oregon and California, is accompanied by a scientific commission,–zoologists, geologists, and botanists. By this means magnificent collections, awaiting only able investigators to work them up, have been brought together. Indeed, I do not believe that as many new things are accumulated anywhere as just here, and it is my hope to contribute hereafter to the more critical and careful examination of these treasures. Under these circumstances I have asked myself for months past how I ought to decide; not what were my inclinations, for that is not the question,–but what was my duty toward science? After the most careful consideration I am no longer in doubt, and though it grieves me to do so, I write to beg that you will withdraw from any action which might bring me a direct call to the professorship in Zurich. I have decided to remain here for an indefinite time, under the conviction that I shall exert a more advantageous and more extensive influence on the progress of science in this country than in Europe.
I regret that I cannot accept your offer of the Oeningen fossils. In the last two years I have spent more than 20,000 francs on my collection, and must not incur any farther expense of that kind at present. As soon, however, as I have new means at my command such a collection would be most welcome, and should it remain in your hands I may be very glad to take it. Neither can I make any exchange of duplicates just now, as I have not yet been able to sort my collections and set aside the specimens which may be considered only as materials for exchange. Can you procure for me Glarus fishes in any considerable number? I should like to purchase them for my collection, and do not care for single specimens of every species, but would prefer whole suites that I may revise my former identifications in the light of a larger insight.
Remember me kindly to all my Zurich friends, and especially to Arnold Escher. . .
Agassiz’s increasing and at last wholly unmanageable correspondence attests the general sympathy for and cooperation with his scientific aims in the United States. In 1853, for instance, he had issued a circular, asking for collections of fishes from various fresh-water systems of the United States, in order that he might obtain certain data respecting the laws of their distribution and localization. To this he had hundreds of answers coming from all parts of the country, many of them very shrewd and observing, giving facts respecting the habits of fishes, as well as concerning their habitat, and offering aid in the general object. Nor were these empty promises. A great number and variety of collections, now making part of the ichthyological treasures of the Museum at Cambridge, were forwarded to him in answer to this appeal. Indeed, he now began to reap, in a new form, the harvest of his wandering lecture tours. In this part of his American experience he had come into contact with all classes of people, and had found some of his most intelligent and sympathetic listeners in the working class. Now that he needed their assistance he often found his co-laborers among farmers, stock-raisers, sea-faring men, fishermen, and sailors. Many a New England captain, when he started on a cruise, had on board collecting cans, furnished by Agassiz, to be filled in distant ports or nearer home, as the case might be, and returned to the Museum at Cambridge. One or two letters, written to scientific friends at the time the above-mentioned circular was issued, will give an idea of the way in which Agassiz laid out such investigations.
TO JAMES D. DANA.
CAMBRIDGE, July 8, 1853.
. . .I have been lately devising some method of learning how far animals are truly autochthones, and how far they have extended their primitive boundaries. I will attempt to test that question with Long Island, the largest of all the islands along our coast. For this purpose I will for the present limit myself to the fresh-water fishes and shells, and for the sake of comparison I will try to collect carefully all the species living in the rivers of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, and see whether they are identical with those of the island. Whatever may come out of such an investigation it will, at all events, furnish interesting data upon the local distribution of the species. . .I am almost confident that it will lead to something interesting, for there is one feature of importance in the case; the present surface of Long Island is not older than the drift period; all its inhabitants must, therefore, have been introduced since that time. I shall see that I obtain similar collections from the upper course of the Connecticut, so as to ascertain whether there, as in the Mississippi, the species differ at different heights of the river basin. . .
TO PROFESSOR S.S. HALDEMAN, COLUMBIA, PENNSYLVANIA.
CAMBRIDGE, July 9, 1853.
. . .While ascending the great Mississippi last spring I was struck with the remarkable fact that the fishes differ essentially in the different parts of that long water-course,–a fact I had already noticed in the Rhine, Rhone, and Danube, though there the difference arises chiefly from the occurrence, in the higher Alpine regions, of representatives of the trout family which are not found in the main river course. In the Mississippi, however, the case is otherwise and very striking, inasmuch as we find here, at separate latitudes, distinct species of the same genera, somewhat like the differences observed in distinct water-basins; and yet the river is ever flowing on past these animals, which remain, as it were, spell-bound to the regions most genial to them. The question at once arises, do our smaller rivers present similar differences? I have already taken steps to obtain complete collections of fishes, shells, and crayfishes from various stations on the Connecticut and the Hudson, and their tributaries; and I should be very happy if I could include the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Ohio in my comparisons. My object in writing now is to inquire whether you could assist me in making separate collections, as complete as possible, of all these animals from the north and west branches of the Susquehanna, from the main river either at Harrisburg or Columbia, and from the Juniata, also from the Schuylkill, Lehigh, and Delaware, and from the Allegheny and Monongahela. I have Swiss friends in the State of New York who have promised me to collect the fishes from the head-waters of the Delaware and Susquehanna within the limits of the State of New York. I cannot, of course, expect you to survey your State for me, but among your acquaintance in various parts of your State are there not those who, with proper directions, could do the work for me? I would, of course, gladly repay all their expenses. The subject seems to me so important as to justify any effort in that direction. Little may be added to the knowledge of the fishes themselves, for I suppose most of the species have been described either by De Kay, Kirtland, or Storer; but a careful study of their special geographical distribution may furnish results as important to zoology as the knowledge of the species themselves. If you cannot write yourself, will you give me the names of such persons as might be persuaded to aid in the matter. I know from your own observations in former times that you have already collected similar facts for the Unios, so that you will at once understand and appreciate my object. . .
He writes in the same strain and for the same object to Professor Yandell, of Kentucky, adding: “In this respect the State of Kentucky is one of the most important of the Union, not only on account of the many rivers which pass through its territory, but also because it is one of the few States the fishes of which have been described by former observers, especially by Rafinesque in his “Ichthyologia Ohioensis,” so that a special knowledge of all his original types is a matter of primary importance for any one who would compare the fishes of the different rivers of the West. . .Do you know whether there is anything left of Rafinesque’s collection of fishes in Lexington, and if so, whether the specimens are labeled, as it would be very important to identify his species from his own collection and his own labels? I never regretted more than now that circumstances have not yet allowed me to visit your State and make a stay in Louisville.”
In 1854 Agassiz moved to a larger house, built for him by the college. Though very simple, it was on a liberal scale with respect to space; partly in order to accommodate his library, consisting of several thousand volumes, now for the first time collected and arranged in one room. He became very fond of this Cambridge home, where, with few absences, he spent the remainder of his life. The architect, Mr. Henry Greenough, was his personal friend, and from the beginning the house adapted itself with a kindly readiness to whatever plans developed under its roof. As will be seen, these were not few, and were sometimes of considerable moment. For his work also the house was extremely convenient. His habits in this respect were, however, singularly independent of place and circumstance. Unlike most studious men, he had no fixed spot in the house for writing. Although the library, with the usual outfit of well-filled shelves, maps, large tables, etc., held his materials, he brought what he needed for the evening by preference to the drawing-room, and there, with his paper on his knee, and his books for reference on a chair beside him, he wrote and read as busily as if he were quite alone. Sometimes when dancing and music were going on among the young people of the family and their guests, he drew a little table into the corner of the room, and continued his occupations as undisturbed and engrossed as if he had been in complete solitude,–only looking up from time to time with a pleased smile or an apt remark, which showed that he did not lose but rather enjoyed what was going on about him.
His children’s friends were his friends. As his daughters grew up, he had the habit of inviting their more intimate companions to his library for an afternoon weekly. On these occasions there was always some subject connected with the study of nature under discussion, but the talk was so easy and so fully illustrated that it did not seem like a lesson. It is pleasant to remember that in later years Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson revived this custom for his own daughters; and their friends (being, indeed, with few changes, the same set of young people as had formerly met in Agassiz’s library) used to meet in Mr. Emerson’s study at Concord for a similar object. He talked to them of poetry and literature and philosophy as Agassiz had talked to them of nature. Those were golden days, not to be forgotten by any who shared their happy privilege.
In the winter of 1855 Agassiz endeavored to resume his public lectures as a means of increasing his resources. He was again, however, much exhausted when spring came, and it seemed necessary to seek some other means of support, for without considering scientific expenses, his salary of fifteen hundred dollars did not suffice for the maintenance of his family. Under these circumstances it occurred to his wife and his two older children, now of an age to assist her in such a scheme, that a school for young ladies might be established in the upper part of the new and larger house. By the removal of one or two partitions, ample room could be obtained for the accommodation of a sufficient number of pupils, and if successful such a school would perhaps make good in a pecuniary sense the lecturing tours which were not only a great fatigue to Agassiz, but an interruption also to all consecutive scientific work. In consultation with friends these plans were partly matured before they were confided to Agassiz himself. When the domestic conspirators revealed their plot, his surprise and pleasure knew no bounds. The first idea had been simply to establish a private school on the usual plan, only referring to his greater experience for advice and direction in its general organization. But he claimed at once an active share in the work. Under his inspiring influence the outline enlarged, and when the circular announcing the school was issued, it appeared under his name, and contained these words in addition to the programme of studies: “I shall myself superintend the methods of instruction and tuition, and while maintaining that regularity and precision in the studies so important to mental training shall endeavor to prevent the necessary discipline from falling into a lifeless routine, alike deadening to the spirit of teacher and pupil. It is farther my intention to take the immediate charge of the instruction in Physical Geography, Natural History, and Botany, giving a lecture daily, Saturdays excepted, on one or other of these subjects, illustrated by specimens, models, maps, and drawings.”
In order not to interrupt the course of the narrative, the history of this undertaking in its sequence and general bearing on his life and work may be completed here in a few words. This school secured to him many happy and comparatively tranquil years. It enabled him to meet both domestic and scientific expenses, and to pay the heavy debt he had brought from Europe as the penalty of his “Fossil Fishes” and his investigations on the glaciers. When the school closed after eight years he was again a free man. With an increased salary from the college, and with such provision for the Museum (thanks to the generosity of the State and of individuals) as rendered it in a great degree independent, he was never again involved in the pecuniary anxieties of his earlier career. The occupation of teaching was so congenial to him that his part in the instruction of the school did not at any time weigh heavily upon him. He never had an audience more responsive and more eager to learn than the sixty or seventy girls who gathered every day at the close of the morning to hear his daily lecture; nor did he ever give to any audience lectures more carefully prepared, more comprehensive in their range of subjects, more lofty in their tone of thought. As a teacher he always discriminated between the special student, and the one to whom he cared to impart only such a knowledge of the facts of nature, as would make the world at least partially intelligible to him. To a school of young girls he did not think of teaching technical science, and yet the subjects of his lectures comprised very abstruse and comprehensive questions. It was the simplicity and clearness of his method which made them so interesting to his young listeners. “What I wish for you,” he would say, “is a culture that is alive, active, susceptible of farther development. Do not think that I care to teach you this or the other special science. My instruction is only intended to show you the thoughts in nature which science reveals, and the facts I give you are useful only, or chiefly, for this object.”
Running over the titles of his courses during several consecutive years of this school instruction they read: Physical Geography and Paleontology; Zoology; Botany; Coral Reefs; Glaciers; Structure and Formation of Mountains; Geographical Distribution of Animals; Geological Succession of Animals; Growth and Development of Animals; Philosophy of Nature, etc. With the help of drawings, maps, bas-reliefs, specimens, and countless illustrations on the blackboard, these subjects were made clear to the pupils, and the lecture hour was anticipated as the brightest of the whole morning. It soon became a habit with friends and neighbors, and especially with the mothers of the scholars, to drop in for the lectures, and thus the school audience was increased by a small circle of older listeners. The corps of teachers was also gradually enlarged. The neighborhood of the university was a great advantage in this respect, and Agassiz had the cooperation not only of his brother-in-law, Professor Felton, but of others among his colleagues, who took classes in special departments, or gave lectures in history and literature.
This school opened in 1855 and closed in 1863. The civil war then engrossed all thoughts, and interfered somewhat also with the success of private undertakings. Partly on this account, partly also because it had ceased to be a pecuniary necessity, it seemed wise to give up the school at this time. The friendly relations formed there did not, however, cease with it. For years afterward on the last Thursday of June (the day of the annual closing of the school) a meeting of the old pupils was held at the Museum, which did not exist when the school began, but was fully established before its close. There Agassiz showed them the progress of his scientific work, told them of his future plans for the institution, and closed with a lecture such as he used to give them in their school-days. The last of these meetings took place in 1873, the last year of his own life. The memory of it is connected with a gift to the Museum of four thousand and fifty dollars from a number of the scholars, now no longer girls, but women with their own cares and responsibilities. Hearing that there was especial need of means for the care of the more recent collections, they had subscribed this sum among themselves to express their affection for their old teacher, as well as their interest in his work, and in the institution he had founded. His letter of acknowledgment to the one among them who had acted as their treasurer makes a fitting close to this chapter.
. . .Hardly anything in my life has touched me more deeply than the gift I received this week from my school-girls. From no source in the world could sympathy be more genial to me. The money I shall appropriate to a long-cherished scheme of mine, a special work in the Museum which must be exclusively my own,–the arrangement of a special collection illustrating in a nutshell, as it were, all the relations existing among animals,–which I have deferred because other things were more pressing, and our means have been insufficient. The feeling that you are all working with me will be even more cheering than the material help, much needed as that is. I wish I could write to each individually. I shall try to find some means of expressing my thanks more widely. Meantime I write to you as treasurer, and beg you, as far as you can do so without too much trouble, to express my gratitude to others. Will you also say to those whom you chance to meet that I shall be at the Museum on the last Thursday of June, at half-past eleven o’clock. I shall be delighted to see all to whom it is convenient to come. The Museum has grown not only in magnitude, but in scientific significance, and I like from time to time to give you an account of its progress, and of my own work and aims. How much thought and care and effort this kind plan of yours must have involved, scattered as you all are! It cannot have been easy to collect the names and addresses of all those whose signatures it was delightful to me to see again. Words seem to me very poor, but you will accept for yourself and your school-mates the warm thanks and affectionate regards of your old friend and teacher.
L.R. AGASSIZ.
CHAPTER 18.
1855-1860: AGE 48-53.
“Contributions to Natural History of the United States.” Remarkable Subscription.
Review of the Work.
Its Reception in Europe and America. Letters from Humboldt and Owen concerning it. Birthday.
Longfellow’s Verses.
Laboratory at Nahant.
Invitation to the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Founding of Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge. Summer Vacation in Europe.
A few months earlier than the school circular Agassiz issued another prospectus, which had an even more important bearing upon his future work. This was the prospectus for his “Contributions to the Natural History of the United States.” It was originally planned in ten volumes, every volume to be, however, absolutely independent, so that the completeness of each part should not be impaired by any possible interruption of the sequence. The mass of original material accumulated upon his hands ever since his arrival in America made such a publication almost imperative, but the costliness of a large illustrated work deterred him. The “Poissons Fossiles” had shown him the peril of entering upon such an enterprise without capital. Perhaps he would never have dared to undertake it but for a friendly suggestion which opened a way out of his perplexities. Mr. Francis C. Gray, of Boston, who felt not only the interest of a personal friend in the matter, but also that of one who was himself a lover of letters and science, proposed an appeal to the public spirit of the country in behalf of a work devoted entirely to the Natural History of the United States. Mr. Gray assumed the direction of the business details, set the subscription afloat, stimulated its success by his own liberal contributions, by letters, by private and public appeals. The result far exceeded the most sanguine expectations of those interested in its success. Indeed, considering the purely scientific character of the work, the number of subscribers for it was extraordinary, and showed again the hold Agassiz had taken upon the minds and affections of the people in general. The contributors were by no means confined to Boston and Cambridge, although the Massachusetts list was naturally the largest, nor were they found exclusively among literary and scientific circles. On the contrary, the subscription list, to the astonishment of the publishers, was increased daily by unsolicited names, sent in from all sections of the country, and from various grades of life and occupation. In reference to the character of this subscription Agassiz says in his Preface: “I must beg my European readers to remember that this work is written in America, and more especially for Americans; and that the community to which it is particularly addressed has very different wants from those of the reading public in Europe. There is not a class of learned men here distinct from the other cultivated members of the community. On the contrary, so general is the desire for knowledge, that I expect to see my book read by operatives, by fishermen, by farmers, quite as extensively as by the students in our colleges or by the learned professions, and it is but proper that I should endeavor to make myself understood by all.” If Agassiz, perhaps, overestimated in this statement the appreciation of the reading public in the United States for pure scientific research, it was because the number and variety of his subscribers gave evidence of a cordiality toward his work which surprised as much as it gratified him. On the list there were also some of his old European subscribers to the “Poissons Fossiles,” among them the King of Prussia, who still continued, under the influence of Humboldt, to feel an interest in his work.
FROM HUMBOLDT TO AGASSIZ.
September 1, 1856.
. . .I hear that by some untoward circumstances, no doubt accidental, you have never received, my dear Agassiz, the letter expressing the pleasure which I share with all true lovers of science respecting your important undertaking, “Contributions to the Natural History of the United States.” You must have been astonished at my silence, remembering, not only the affectionate relations we have held to each other ever since your first sojourn at Paris, but also the admiration I have never ceased to feel for the great and solid works which we owe to your sagacious mind and your incomparable intellectual energy. . .I approve especially the general conceptions which lie at the base of the plan you have traced. I admire the long series of physiological investigations, beginning with the embryology of the so-called simple and lower organisms and ascending by degrees to the more complicated. I admire that ever-renewed comparison of the types belonging to our planet, in its present condition, with those now found only in a fossil state, so abundant in the immense space lying between the shores opposite to northern Europe and northern Asia. The geographical distribution of organic forms in curves of equal density of occupation represents in great degree the inflexions of the isothermal lines. . .I am charged by the king, who knows the value of your older works, and who still feels for you the affectionate regard which he formerly expressed in person, to request that you will place his name at the head of your long list of subscribers. He wishes that an excursion across the Atlantic valley may one day bring you, who have so courageously braved Alpine summits, to the historic hill of Sans Souci. . .
Something of Agassiz’s astonishment and pleasure at the encouragement given to his projected work is told in his letters. To his old friend Professor Valenciennes, in Paris, he writes: “I have just had an evidence of what one may do here in the interest of science. Some six months ago I formed a plan for the publication of my researches in America, and determined to carry it out with all possible care and beauty of finish. I estimated my materials at ten volumes, quarto, and having fixed the price at 60 francs (12 dollars) a volume, thought I might, perhaps, dispose of five hundred. I brought out my prospectus, and I have to-day seventeen hundred subscribers. What do you say to that for a work which is to cost six hundred francs a copy, and of which nothing has as yet appeared? Nor is the list closed yet, for every day I receive new subscriptions,–this very morning one from California! Where will not the love of science find its niche!”. . .
In the same strain he says, at a little later date, to Sir Charles Lyell: “You will, no doubt, be pleased to learn that the first volume of my new work, ‘Contributions to the Natural History of the United States,’ which is to consist of ten volumes, quarto, is now printing, to come out this summer. I hope it will show that I have not been idle during ten years’ silence. I am somewhat anxious about the reception of my first chapter, headed, ‘Classification,’ which contains anything but what zoologists would generally expect under that head. The subscription is marvelous. Conceive twenty-one hundred names before the appearance of the first pages of a work costing one hundred and twenty dollars! It places in my hands the means of doing henceforth for Natural History what I had never dreamed of before.”. . .
This work, as originally planned, was never completed. It was cut short by ill-health and by the pressure of engagements arising from the rapid development of the great Museum, which finally became, as will be seen, the absorbing interest of his life. As it stands, the “Contributions to the Natural History of the United States” consists of four large quarto volumes. The first two are divided into three parts, namely: 1st. An Essay on Classification. 2nd. The North American Testudinata. 3rd. The Embryology of the Turtle,–the latter two being illustrated by thirty-four plates. The third and fourth volumes are devoted to the Radiata, and consist of five parts, namely: 1st. Acalephs in general. 2nd. Ctenophorae. 3rd. Discophorae. 4th. Hydroida. 5th. Homologies of the Radiates, –illustrated by forty-six plates.* (* The plates are of rare accuracy and beauty, and were chiefly drawn by A. Sonrel, though many of the microscopic drawings were made by Professor H.J. Clark, who was at that time Agassiz’s private assistant. For details respecting Professor Clark’s share in this work, and also concerning the aid of various kinds furnished to the author during its preparation, the reader is referred to the Preface of the volumes themselves.)
For originality of material, clearness of presentation, and beauty of illustration, these volumes have had their full recognition as models of scientific work. Their philosophy was, perhaps, too much out of harmony with the current theories of the day to be acceptable. In the “Essay on Classification” especially, Agassiz brought out with renewed earnestness his conviction that the animal world rests upon certain abstract conceptions, persistent and indestructible. He insists that while physical influences maintain, and within certain limits modify, organisms, they have never affected typical structure,–those characters, namely, upon which the great groups of the animal kingdom are united. From his point of view, therefore, what environment can do serves to emphasize what it cannot do. For the argument on which these conclusions are based we refer to the book itself. The discussion of this question occupies, however, only the first portion of the volume, two thirds of which are devoted to a general consideration of classification, and the ideas which it embodies, with a review of the modern systems of zoology.
The following letter was one of many in the same tone received from his European correspondents concerning this work.
FROM RICHARD OWEN.
December 9, 1857.
. . .I cannot permit a day to elapse without thanking you for the two volumes of your great work on American zoology, which, from your masterly and exhaustive style of treatment, becomes the most important contribution to the right progress of zoological science in all parts of the world where progress permits its cultivation. It is worthy of the author of the classical work on fossil fishes; and such works, like the Cyclopean structures of antiquity, are built to endure. I feel and I beg to express a fervent hope that you may be spared in health and vigor to see the completion of your great plan.
I have placed in Mr. Trubner’s hands a set of the numbers (6) of my “History of British Fossil Reptiles,” which have already appeared; a seventh will soon be out, and as they will be sent to you in succession I hope you will permit me to make a small and inadequate return for your liberality in the gift of your work by adding your name to the list of my subscribers. . .
Believe me always truly yours,
RICHARD OWEN.
Agassiz had promised himself that the first volume of his new work should be finished in time for his fiftieth birthday,–a milestone along the road, as it were, to mark his half century. Upon this self-appointed task he spent himself with the passion dominated by patience, which characterized him when his whole heart was bent toward an end. For weeks he wrote many hours of the day and a great part of the night, going out sometimes into the darkness and the open air to cool the fever of work, and then returning to his desk again. He felt himself that the excitement was too great, and in proportion to the strain was the relief when he set the seal of finis on his last page within the appointed time.
His special students, young men who fully shared his scientific life and rewarded his generosity by an affectionate devotion, knowing, perhaps, that he himself associated the completion of his book with his birthday, celebrated both events by a serenade on the eve of his anniversary. They took into their confidence Mr. Otto Dresel, warmly valued by Agassiz both as friend and musician, and he arranged their midnight programme for them. Always sure of finding their professor awake and at work at that hour, they stationed the musicians before the house, and as the last stroke of twelve sounded, the succeeding stillness was broken by men’s voices singing a Bach choral. When Agassiz stepped out to see whence came this pleasant salutation, he was met by his young friends bringing flowers and congratulations. Then followed one number after another of the well-ordered selection, into which was admitted here and there a German student song in memory of Agassiz’s own university life at Heidelberg and Munich. It was late, or rather early, since the new day was already begun, before the little concert was over and the guests had dispersed. It is difficult to reproduce with anything like its original glow and coloring a scene of this kind. It will no more be called back than the hour or the moonlight night which had the warmth and softness of June. It is recorded here only because it illustrates the intimate personal sympathy between Agassiz and his students.
For this occasion also were written the well-known birthday verses by Longfellow, which were read the next day at a dinner given to Agassiz by the “Saturday Club.” In speaking of Longfellow’s relation to this club, Holmes says “On one occasion he read a short poem at the table. It was in honor of Agassiz’s birthday, and I cannot forget the very modest, delicate musical way in which he read his charming verses.” Although included in many collections of Longfellow’s Poems, they are reproduced here, because the story seems incomplete without them.
THE FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY OF AGASSIZ.
It was fifty years ago,
In the pleasant month of May,
In the beautiful Pays de Vaud,
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 marvelous 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! For his voice I listen and yearn;
It is growing late and dark,
And my boy does not return!”
May 28, 1857.
Longfellow had an exquisite touch for occasions of this kind, whether serious or mirthful. Once, when some years after this Agassiz was keeping Christmas Eve with his children and grandchildren, there arrived a basket of wine containing six old bottles of rare vintage. They introduced themselves in a charming French “Noel” as pilgrims from beyond the sea who came to give Christmas greeting to the master of the house. Gay pilgrims were these six “gaillards,” and they were accompanied by the following note:–
“A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all the house of Agassiz!
“I send also six good wishes in the shape of bottles. Or is it wine?
“It is both; good wine and good wishes, and kind memories of you on this Christmas Eve.”
H.W.L.
An additional word about the “Saturday Club,” the fame of which has spread beyond the city of its origin, may not be amiss here. Notwithstanding his close habits of work Agassiz was eminently social, and to this club he was especially attached. Dr. Holmes says of it in his volume on Emerson, who was one of its most constant members: “At one end of the table sat Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always pleasant to look,–whose silence was better than many another man’s conversation. At the other end sat Agassiz, robust, sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar, eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion of freedom, Andrew, ‘the great War Governor’ of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe, the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy of such company.” We may complete the list and add the name of Holmes himself, to whose presence the club owed so much of its wit and wisdom. In such company the guests were tempted to linger long, and if Holmes has described the circle around the table, Lowell has celebrated the late walk at night across the bridge as he and Agassiz returned to Cambridge on foot together. To break the verse by quotation would mar the quiet scene and interrupt the rambling pleasant talk it so graphically describes. But we may keep the parting words:
“At last, arrived at where our paths divide,’Good night!’ and, ere the distance grew too wide, ‘Good night!’ again; and now with cheated ear I half hear his who mine shall never hear.”
(* See Memorial poem, entitled “Agassiz”, by James Russell Lowell.)
Agassiz was now the possessor of a small laboratory by the immediate sea-coast. It was situated on the northeastern shore of Nahant, within a stone’s throw of broken and bold rocks, where the deep pools furnished him with ever fresh specimens from natural aquariums which were re-stocked at every rise of the tide. This laboratory, with a small cottage adjoining, which was shared during the summer between his own family and that of Professor Felton, was the gift of his father-in-law, Mr. Cary. So carefully were his wishes considered that the microscope table stood on a flat rock sunk in the earth and detached from the floor, in order that no footstep or accidental jarring of door or window in other parts of the building might disturb him at his work.
There, summer after summer, he pursued his researches on the medusae; from the smaller and more exquisite kinds, such as the Pleurobrachyias, Idyias, and Bolinas, to the massive Cyaneas, with their large disks and heavy tentacles, many yards in length. Nothing can be prettier than the smaller kinds of jellyfishes. Their structure is so delicate, yet so clearly defined, their color so soft, yet often so brilliant, their texture so transparent, that you seek in vain among terrestrial forms for terms of comparison, and are tempted to say that nature has done her finest work in the sea rather than on land. Sometimes hundreds of these smaller medusae might be seen floating together in the deep glass bowls, or jars, or larger vessels with which Agassiz’s laboratory at Nahant was furnished. When the supply was exhausted, new specimens were easily to be obtained by a row in a dory a mile or two from shore, either in the hot, still noon, when the jelly-fish rise toward the surface, or at night, over a brilliantly phosphorescent sea, when they are sure to be abundant, since they themselves furnish much of the phosphorescence. In these little excursions, many new and interesting things came to his nets beside those he was seeking. The fishermen, also, were his friends and coadjutors. They never failed to bring him whatever of rare or curious fell into their hands, sometimes even turning aside from their professional calling to give the laboratory preference over the market.
Neither was his summer work necessarily suspended during winter, his Cambridge and Nahant homes being only about fifteen miles distant from each other. He writes to his friends, the Holbrooks, at this time, “You can hardly imagine what a delightful place Nahant is for me now. I can trace the growth of my little marine animals all the year round without interruption, by going occasionally over there during the winter. I have at this moment young medusae budding from their polyp nurses, which I expect to see freeing themselves in a few weeks.” In later years, when his investigations on the medusae were concluded, so far as any teaching from the open book of Nature can be said to be concluded, he pursued here, during a number of years, investigations upon the sharks and skates. For this work, which should have made one of the series of “Contributions,” he left much material, unhappily not ready for publication.
In August, 1857, Agassiz received the following letter from M. Rouland, Minister of Public Instruction in France.
TO PROFESSOR AGASSIZ.
PARIS, August 19, 1857.
SIR,
By the decease of M. d’Orbigny the chair of paleontology in the Museum of Natural History in Paris becomes vacant. You are French; you have enriched your native country by your eminent works and laborious researches. You are a corresponding member of the Institute. The emperor would gladly recall to France a savant so distinguished. In his name I offer you the vacant chair, and should congratulate your country on the return of a son who has shown himself capable of such devotion to science.
Accept the assurance of my highest esteem,
ROULAND.
Had it been told to Agassiz when he left Europe that in ten years he should be recalled to fill one of the coveted places at the Jardin des Plantes, the great centre of scientific life and influence in France, he would hardly have believed himself capable of refusing it. Nor does a man reject what would once have seemed to him a great boon without a certain regret. Such momentary regret he felt perhaps, but not an instant of doubt. His answer expressed his gratitude and his pleasure in finding himself so remembered in Europe. He pleaded his work in America as his excuse for declining a position which he nevertheless considered the most brilliant that could be offered to a naturalist. In conclusion he adds: “Permit me to correct an error concerning myself. I am not French, although of French origin. My family has been Swiss for centuries, and spite of my ten years’ exile I am Swiss still.”
The correspondence did not end here. A few months later the offer was courteously renewed by M. Rouland, with the express condition that the place should remain open for one or even two years to allow time for the completion of the work Agassiz had now on hand. To this second appeal he could only answer that his work here was the work not of years, but of his life, and once more decline the offer. That his refusal was taken in good part is evident from the fact that the order of the Legion of Honor was sent to him soon after, and that from time to time he received friendly letters from the Minister of Public Instruction, who occasionally consulted him upon general questions of scientific moment.
This invitation excited a good deal of interest among Agassiz’s old friends in Europe. Some urged him to accept it, others applauded his resolve to remain out of the great arena of competition and ambition. Among the latter was Humboldt. The following extract is from a letter of his (May 9, 1858) to Mr. George Ticknor, of Boston, who had been one of Agassiz’s kindest and best friends in America from the moment of his arrival. “Agassiz’s large and beautiful work (the first two volumes) reached me a few days since. It will produce a great effect both by the breadth of its general views and by the extreme sagacity of its special embryological observations. I have never believed that this illustrious man, who is also a man of warm heart, a noble soul, would accept the generous offers made to him from Paris. I knew that gratitude would keep him in the new country, where he finds such an immense territory to explore, and such liberal aid in his work.”
In writing of this offer to a friend Agassiz himself says: “On one side, my cottage at Nahant by the sea-shore, the reef of Florida, the vessels of the Coast Survey at my command from Nova Scotia to Mexico, and, if I choose, all along the coast of the Pacific,–and on the other, the Jardin des Plantes, with all its accumulated treasures. Rightly considered, the chance of studying nature must prevail over the attractions of the (Paris) Museum. I hope I shall be wise enough not to be tempted even by the prospect of a new edition of the ‘Poissons Fossiles.'”
To his old friend Charles Martins, the naturalist, he writes: “The work I have undertaken here, and the confidence shown in me by those who have at heart the intellectual development of this country, make my return to Europe impossible for the present; and, as you have well understood, I prefer to build anew here rather than to fight my way in the midst of the coteries of Paris. Were I offered absolute power for the reorganization of the Jardin des Plantes, with a revenue of fifty thousand francs, I should not accept it. I like my independence better.”
The fact that Agassiz had received and declined this offer from the French government seemed to arouse anew the public interest in his projects and prospects here. It was felt that a man who was ready to make an alliance so uncompromising with the interests of science in the United States should not be left in a precarious and difficult position. His collections were still heaped together in a slight wooden building. The fact that a great part of them were preserved in alcohol made them especially in danger from fire. A spark, a match carelessly thrown down, might destroy them all in half an hour, for with material so combustible, help would be unavailing. This fear was never out of his mind. It disturbed his peace by day and his rest by night. That frail structure, crowded from garret to cellar with seeming rubbish, with boxes, cases, barrels, casks still unpacked and piled one above the other, held for him the treasure out of which he would give form and substance to the dream of his boyhood and the maturer purpose of his manhood. The hope of creating a great museum intelligently related in all its parts, reflecting nature, and illustrating the history of the animal kingdom in the past and the present, had always tempted his imagination. Nor was it merely as a comprehensive and orderly collection that he thought of it. From an educational point of view it had an even greater value for him. His love of teaching prompted him no less than his love of science. Indeed, he hoped to make his ideal museum a powerful auxiliary in the interests of the schools and teachers throughout the State, and less directly throughout the country. He hoped it would become one of the centres for the radiation of knowledge, and that the investigations carried on within its walls would find means of publication, and be a fresh, original contribution to the science of the day. This hope was fully realized. The first number of the Museum Bulletin was published in March, 1863, the first number of the Illustrated Catalogue in 1864, and both publications have been continued with regularity ever since.* (* At the time of Agassiz’s death nearly three volumes of the Bulletin had been published, and the third volume of the “Memoirs” (Illustrated Catalogue Number 7) had been begun.)
In laying out the general plan, which was rarely absent from his thought, he distinguished between the demands which the specialist and the general observer might make upon an institution intended to instruct and benefit both. Here the special student should find in the laboratories and work rooms all the needed material for his investigations, stored in large collections, with duplicates enough to allow for that destruction of specimens which is necessarily involved in original research. The casual visitor meanwhile should walk through exhibition rooms, not simply crowded with objects to delight and interest him, but so arranged that the selection of every specimen should have reference to its part and place in nature; while the whole should be so combined as to explain, so far as known, the faunal and systematic relations of animals in the actual world, and in the geological formations; or, in other words, their succession in time, and their distribution in space.
A favorite part of his plan was a room which he liked to call his synoptic room. Here was to be the most compact and yet the fullest statement in material form of the animal kingdom as a whole, an epitome of the creation, as it were. Of course the specimens must be few in so limited a space, but each one was to be characteristic of one or other of the various groups included under every large division. Thus each object would contribute to the explanation of the general plan. On the walls there were to be large, legible inscriptions, serving as a guide to the whole, and making this room a simple but comprehensive lesson in natural history. It was intended to be the entrance room for visitors, and to serve as an introduction to the more detailed presentation of the same vast subject, given by the faunal and systematic collections in the other exhibition rooms.
The standard of work involved in this scheme is shown in many of his letters to his students and assistants, to whom he looked for aid in its execution. To one he writes: “You will get your synoptic series only after you have worked up in detail the systematic collection as a whole, the faunal collections in their totality, the geological sequence of the entire group under consideration, as well as its embryology and geographical distribution. Then alone will you be able to know the representatives in each series which will best throw light upon it and complete the other series.”
He did not live to fill in this comprehensive outline with the completeness which he intended, but all its details were fully explained by him before his death, and since that time have been carried out by his son, Alexander Agassiz. The synoptic room, and in great part the systematic and faunal collections, are now arranged and under exhibition, and the throngs of visitors during all the pleasant months of the year attest the interest they excite.