Abraham Agassiz

“ After seeing Ralph Waldo Emerson I spent one glorious day at Nahant with Agassiz. He took us to his laboratory, where we saw jelly-fishes galore and heard his wise, witty talk, which instructed the American people — North, South, East, and West. If ever a man made nature give up her secrets, that man was Agassiz. ”

“ Agassiz wisely observes that, "men frequently talk very learnedly of what they know but very little;" and I know of nothing more irresistibly ludicrous than to see one of these so-called scientific skeptics, who scarcely knows the difference between the leg of a wasp and the horn of a beetle, and yet will assume to patronize the Almighty and talk about progress and culture as though he was the most remarkable prodigy of the age in which he lives. ”

“ His first studies at home were directed by his mother, who was a woman of high endowments and rare culture. At the age of ten years he and his younger brother were sent to the gymnasium at Biel, in the neighboring canton of Bern; here he acquired the ancient and modern languages, which later became so valuable to him in his biological investigations. Very early in life Agassiz showed a fondness for natural science, and in his boyhood days he began collecting specimens. His leisure time at the gymnasium was similarly occupied, and his first collection of fishes dates from this period. ”

“ Agassiz places a high estimate on the intelligence as well as the kind spirit of his adopted countrymen. "There is not a class of learned men here," he says, "distinct from the other cultivated members of the community. ”

“ The King of Prussia offered him three thousand dollars, to be spent in travel for scientific purposes; and at the same time came an invitation from the Lowell Institute of Boston to visit the United States. Agassiz could not refuse. It was a solution of all his immediate difficulties; a wide horizon in the eager young republic spread before him. In September, 1846, Agassiz sailed for Boston.
He had left behind him all that is wealth to a scientific man. Books and collections were the tools of his trade; in his fellow naturalists he had found help and inspiration. ”

“ As we show in another place, a literature of reconciliation is springing up, and we are beginning to hear of Christian evolutionists, as we have long heard of Christian astronomers and Christian geologists. But because Agassiz was a Theist, it by no means follows that his theories of Natural History were specially religious, and the attempt to make them so, so far as influential at all, will be doubly mischievous. It will prejudice scientific inquiry by favoring the idea that the results of investigation may be irreligious ”

“ What parent can read without a shudder the following extract from a Boston paper regarding the recent investigation of a savant who, it is well known, is no friend to Catholicity or the teachings of the church:
“Professor Agassiz has of late given a portion of his valuable time to an investigation of the social evil, its causes and growth, and the result has filled him with dismay, and almost destroyed his faith in the boasted civilization of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Please give a biographical sketch of Professor Agassiz.
R. A. Coats.
Answer.—Louis John Rudolf Agassiz, the son of a Swiss Protestant clergyman, was born near Lake Neuchatel, May 28, 1807. After completing his academical course, he studied medicine at Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich, preparatory to becoming a physician. Meanwhile Spix and Martins had returned from Brazil with a valuable collection of fossil fishes ”

“ Agassiz under the flagstaff on the summit of the island, overlooking the western sea, to watch the glories of the dying day, whiling away the hour with song and familiar converse—all these memories and many more crowd upon us for notice, but we forbear.
Alas! that the golden hopes raised by such brilliant beginning should so soon be blasted. Agassiz died during the succeeding December. No man was ever more generally, more tenderly, or more profoundly mourned. By none was his loss felt with more poignant grief than by those who were with him at Penikese. ”

“ In these earliest lectures he sounded the note of which his last public utterance was the dying cadence. For, as this biography rightly intimates, his scientific life was singularly entire and homogeneous—if not uninfluenced, yet quite unchanged, by the transitions which have marked the period. In a small circle of naturalists, almost the first that was assembled to greet him on his coming to this country, and of which the writer is the sole survivor, when Agassiz was inquired of as to his conception of "species," he sententiously replied: "A species is a thought of the Creator." ”

“ And it is to him alone that credit is due for the money that was thus raised, at a cost to science of priceless hours of his own all-too-limited time and energy.
The intellect of Agassiz was gigantic, and yet he combined with his mighty forces an unfailing patience with dull or ignorant people. His craving for knowledge was equaled only by his ability in imparting it to others. Nothing that he achieved was for himself: his all was attained that he might give it to the world. “Good teachers are not commonly original investigators ”

“ This was in the summer of 1873, and Agassiz died the December following.
On the isle of Penikese,
Ringed about by sapphire seas,
Fanned by breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school.
Over sails that not in vain
Wooed the west-wind's steady strain,
Line of coast that low and far
Stretched its undulating bar,
Wings aslant along the rim
Of the waves they stooped to skim,
Rock and isle and glistening bay,
Fell the beautiful white day.
Said the Master to the youth
"We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery ”

“ Are you driven to the necessity of proving the existence of one tyrant by the words of another? Personally, I have but little confidence in a religion that satisfied the heart of a man who, to gratify his ambition, filled half the world with widows and orphans. In regard to Agassiz, it is just to say that he furnished a vast amount of testimony in favor of the truth of the theories of Charles Darwin, and then denied the correctness of these theories—preferring the good opinions of Harvard for a few days to the lasting applause of the intellectual world. ”

“ Certainly no man ever did more to popularize the genuine truths of science in this country than Professor Agassiz, or worked more successfully to that end. He was willing to place the decorative wreath on the starry forehead of science, but refused to pluck from the soul "the starry eyes of faith and hope," that man might be dwarfed down to the "nearest of kin" to the anthropoid ape. ”

“ But as I had been among men who had a free swing, and for a year among people who seemed to me to be cold and super-rational, hungry as I doubtless was for human sympathy, Agassiz's welcome went to my heart—I was at once his captive. It has been my good chance to see many men of engaging presence and ways, but I have never known his equal. ”

“ Attainments will be greater, and discovery and accomplishments will surpass themselves as we go on, but to be, as Emerson was, is absolute and complete existence.
Agassiz was, of all our company, the acknowledged master; loved by all, even to the unlettered woodsmen, who ran to meet his service as to no other of the company; by all the members of it reverenced as not even Emerson was; the largest in personality and in universality of knowledge of all the men I have ever known. No one who did not know him personally can conceive the hold he had on everybody who came into relations with him. ”

“ Agassiz not simply as one among a dozen or twenty living naturalists of the highest rank, but as occupying a solitary position as the greatest of all living naturalists—as a kind of second Cuvier, for example. There is, to the popular eye, a halo about the name of Agassiz which there is not about the name of Gray; though, if there is any man now living in America, of whom America might, justly boast as her chief ornament and pride, so far as science is concerned, that man is unquestionably Prof. ”

“ Life in Boston and in the clear atmosphere of the University must have been highly stimulating to a man of Agassiz’s sensitive susceptibilities. Emerson, Holmes, Hawthorne, Motley, and Longfellow were his companions, and a group of brilliant younger minds surrounded him in his work.
From abroad now came honors the larger part of which Agassiz saw fit to decline. In 1852 the Prix Cuvier was awarded to him in recognition of his work on fossil fishes. ”

“ The citizens of his adopted town expressed their appreciation of his loyalty to them in a warm letter of thanks, begging, at the same time, his acceptance of the sum of six thousand francs, payable by installments during three years.
The summer of 1837 was a sad one to Agassiz and to his whole family; his father died at Concise, carried off by a fever while still a comparatively young man. The pretty parsonage, to which they were so much attached, passed into other hands, and thenceforward the home of Madame Agassiz was with her children, among whom she divided her time. ”

“ Agassiz's scientific character remains to be noticed. Science was to him not merely the knowledge of animals, rocks, and glaciers, but it was a method of thought, rising into the proportions of a philosophy, and embracing the interests of humanity. By the vulgar-minded he was looked upon as a very wonderful man, whose genius spent itself upon crabs and their kindred, and who would give the world for a new fish. ”

“ There are few of us left who can remember the sudden shadow that fell on our community at his unexpected death, and the universal grief that told of the hold he had on the entire nation; and the mourning extended far beyond the circle of personal acquaintance with Agassiz. Even men who had no interest in physical science took it into consideration on account of him, carried away by his enthusiastic advocacy of its advancement. ”

“ I have profited a great deal by hearing Agassiz talk, not so much by what he says, for never did a man utter a greater amount of humbug, but by learning the way of feeling of such a vast practical engine as he is. No one sees farther into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends, and you have a greater feeling of weight and solidity about the movement of Agassiz's mind, owing to the continual presence of this great background of special facts, than about the mind of any other man I know. ”

“ On December 14, 1873, Louis Agassiz died at Cambridge, in the shadow of the walls of the great University [Pg 55] of which he had become so loyal a member. Above his grave a simple granite boulder from the glacier of the Aar, sent by loving friends in the land of his birth, gives in its brief inscription the name of a man whom the United States proudly claims as citizen, and whom the world honors as a man. ”

“ Agassiz, before venturing upon the course he has adopted, to dissociate himself from a University to which so many of the youth of the country have been sent without any thought on the part of their parents that they were to be exposed there to influences which they would dread above all others. There is no right to offer, except to men, capable of its thorough apprehension, any new or questionable or unsettled doctrine. ”

“ He was the third great man who had thrown his influence as a barrier across the current of evolutionary thought. Linnaeus in the second half of the eighteenth century, Cuvier in the first half, and Agassiz in the second half of the nineteenth—all made the same effort. Each remains great; but not all of them together could arrest the current. Agassiz's strong efforts throughout the United States, and indeed throughout Europe, to check it, really promoted it. ”

“ Now, to Agassiz, as to all genuine thinkers, the existence of God, like our own existence, is more certain than any scientific theory, than anything can possibly be made by proof. From his standpoint, therefore, he was right in rejecting evolution as conflicting with still more certain truth. The mistake which he made was in imagining that there was any such conflict at all. But this was the universal mistake of the age. A lesser man would have seen less clearly the higher truth and accepted the lower. ”

“ The loss to American science in his death can never be estimated, for his mind was of that subtle and inductive nature which is needed for such a study, fine to poetic delicacy, penetrating with all the acumen of a true scientific imagination, but modest to excess, and personally so attached to Agassiz that he would with reluctance give expression to a difference from him, though that he did differ was no occasion for abatement of their mutual regard. ”

“ But, as the work grew in her hands, she says she began to feel that an intellectual life, marked by such unusual coherence and unity of aim, might serve as a stimulus and an encouragement to others. And, for this reason, she at length decided to place it before the general public. The first volume contains a portrait of Agassiz at the age of nine-teen, and several other interesting illustrations connected with his birthplace and early life. ”

“ He liked merry society, but he himself was in general reserved, and never noisy. He picked out the gifted and highly learned students, and would not waste his time in ordinary conversation. Often, when he saw a number of students going off on some empty pleasure-trip, he said to me, 'There they go with the other fellows.... I will go my own way, Mr. Dinkel,—and not alone. I will be a leader of others.'"
Agassiz writes to his brother Auguste: "It will interest you to know that I am working with a young Dr. Born upon an anatomy and natural history of the fresh-water fishes of Europe. ”

“ He would only say then that there could be nothing higher than a man with his spirit.
Whether Agassiz was as broad-minded as he was high-minded may be argued. The story ran that when the foundations of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy were going on in Divinity Avenue, a theological professor encountering the scientist among the shadows the latter was invading, courteously bade him welcome. He hoped the old Divinity Hall would be a good neighbour to the pile rising opposite. ”