This is the third of several installments of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. The first two brought us Louis Agassiz, Alexander’s father, who yearned to be “the first naturalist of his generation,” and the Rumble at Glen Roy, in which the young Louis, wielding ice, bests a young Charles Darwin in the first clash between these two ambitious intellects.
This installment finds 13-year-old Alexander joining his father, Louis Agassiz, in America. Louis, who had risen to prominence in his native Europe in the 1840s, came to America in 1849 and found even greater success and fame by seductively describing the “Plan of Creation” — a gorgeous creationist view of the natural order as a work of God. He was an extraordinary lecturer — a sort of TED fantasy of explication and charm. These talents would make him the country’s foremost scientist and set up an extraordinary showdown with Darwin.
This is part of the book’s fourth chapter. For the whole thing, or if you ‘re impatient, buy the book. Or feel free to dip in here and come back next week for the next installment, in which Louis confronts an explanation of the natural order as powerful as his “Plan of Creation,” but far more threatening.
4. Cambridge
from Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral
© David Dobbs, all rights reserved
Arriving in New York in June 1849, thirteen-year-old Alexander Agassiz entered a world sharply different than the one he had left. Though Boston, to which Louis immediately took him, resembled European cities more than did most American towns (Louis generously likened it to Paris and London), it remained a far cry from Freiburg. And Alex, shy to start with, knowing hardly a word of English, must have felt the language barrier keenly.
He found his father, however, glowing from his seduction of his new country. For Louis Agassiz had conquered the United States faster and more thoroughly than perhaps any foreigner ever had. He loomed large almost from the instant he arrived, and while he made a sensational impact, it proved lasting, exerting an intellectual and cultural influence well beyond his initial fame and beyond even his death a quarter-century later. Much of the initial fervor was created by his brilliance, eloquence, and charm. But his wider, more lasting impact spread not simply because he was irresistible, but because he offered a set of ideas for which his new country was ripe. His reconciliation of Christianity and science stood at the center of this appeal. But equally vital was that his particular marriage of learning and spirit — his elegant synthesis of the scholarly world of facts and ideas with a Whitmanesque sensual attentiveness — offered a way for his vibrant but insecure adopted country to establish its intellectual heritage. As a result, his appeal overran bounds of fashion, politics, interest, and time. His contemporary admirers included virtually all of his scientific and intellectual peers, the country’s financial and social elite, and cultural luminaries ranging from Longfellow to Thoreau. Among later generations, his devotees spanned the spectrum from Teddy Roosevelt to Ezra Pound and included virtually every naturalist trained in the United States. These admirers saw in Louis something vitally American. As William James (who traveled to Brazil with Louis as a Harvard undergrad and became friends with Alex) wrote in a moving and insightful tribute almost 25 years after Louis’s death, no American since Benjamin Franklin had so embodied the country’s spirit or captured its imagination.
Louis’s American notoriety actually preceded him. The textile magnate and Harvard supporter John Amory Lowell, founder of the Lowell Institute and its already famous lecture series, first heard of Louis in detail in 1842 when Charles Lyell, in Boston to give that year’s Lowell lectures, gushed about Louis’s eloquence and agility of mind. Bolstered with that and other recommendations (a composite portrait suggesting a warm-and-fuzzy fusion of Cuvier and Lyell), Lowell invited Louis to give the lectures over the winter of 1846-1847, then excited his many friends in the national press into trumpeting Louis’s arrival. The accolades grew as Louis spent his first month in the U.S. visiting universities and science centers in New Haven, Albany, New York City, Princeton, Philadelphia, and Washington. He completely seduced the country’s intelligentsia. He seemed to know the particulars of almost all current natural science and could eloquently discuss the philosophical questions raised. He showed a flattering curiosity about everyone’s work and seemed to instantly grasp the possibilities, problems, and fascinations of every scientific inquiry — and often offered observations that expanded the investigator’s horizons. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a second-generation Yale chemistry professor who knew pretty much everyone in American science, offered a typical effusion after Louis’s first visit to New Haven:
He is full of knowledge on all subjects of science, imparts it in the most graceful and modest manner and has, if possible, more of bonhomie than of knowledge. He has a more minute knowledge of his subject and at the same time a more wonderful generalizing power and philosophical tone than any man I have ever met…. It is not yet agreed whether the Ladies more liked the Man or the Gentlemen the Philosopher.
Louis cemented this impression of amiable savant with the Lowell Lecture series he gave beginning that December. By that time the talks were so keenly anticipated that the organizers offered a second lecture most days, and Louis packed the house — some 5000 seats — again and again. The lectures, on “The Plan of Creation in the Animal Kingdom,” elaborated Cuvier’s vision of nature as divine design, but with a panache that only Louis could bring. In talks rich with facts, oddities, and charming asides, he described how the preceding century’s zoological discoveries had revealed a natural order so intricately patterned that only a supreme intelligence could have created it. Some of nature’s patterns, he explained, announced themselves — witness the prevalence of symmetry in body type or other major traits shared by closely related species — while other patterns revealed themselves only through close observation — the way developing embryos of advanced species, for instance, seemed to mimic successively the forms of “lower” species, so that a chimpanzee fetus resembled first a fish and then a pig before coming to look something like a chimp. He chose examples so astutely and described them so evocatively that while a textile worker could understand them, the country’s most advanced scientists, such as the botanist Asa Gray or Benjamin Silliman, Jr., learned something new.
He described the discovery of unexpected and often beautiful patterns in highly different life forms, such as spiral structures found in both plants and animals; food-catching tentacles found in sea animals and terrestrial plants; or the radiate patterns found in both flowers and marine invertebrates. About the time he had everyone slack-jawed in wonder, he would provide comic relief by explaining how even the apparent breaks from this pattern — what he called “God’s leetle jokes,” such as the turtle or the narwhal — fit into the plan. Working without notes, he delivered all this with great animation and humor. When he was stumped for the right word in English (fumbling always oh so endearingly through a few candidates), he would draw on the blackboard, describing as he went.
Such a vast, complicated, highly structured scheme, he explained, could only be the work of God. What else could explain such variety of form unified by so many patterns? True, some scientists and philosophers had suggested that some undocumented dynamic called evolution, or transmutation, might be at hand. But evolution was not only unfounded (for no one had ever shown how one species could change to another); it was unneeded, for divine design could explain all of nature’s wonderful diversity. A species did not emerge from some mysterious transmuting force. It rose, said Louis, as “a thought of God.”
Thus Louis Agassiz sold a view of nature that seemed both enticingly progressive and safely devout. Like the Cuvierian taxonomy from which it sprang, Louis’s Plan of Creation seemed to push science forward without threatening prevailing religious views about the world’s genesis. Louis appeared to resolve the tension between science and religion that had haunted scientists since Copernicus. Here was a rigorous science that not only tolerated belief in God; it actually required it.
It was an alluring vision. Louis made it even more so by insisting that the observant amateur could discover these patterns as readily as the learned scholar. “Study nature, not books,” he urged his audience, espousing a seductively egalitarian notion of what it takes to learn. Like a music teacher who kindly insisted that feeling the music is the main thing — never mind all this theory, technique, and note-reading — he appealed both to the democratic spirit and to the romantic notion that formal education is less important than enthusiastic application.
Louis’s elevation of nature above books ignored the exhaustive formal study underlying his own knowledge. It also clashed with an elitism that showed in his clubbiness and his later development of exclusive scientific societies such as the National Academy of Sciences. Yet it stood in perfect accord with his romanticism. Perhaps because he discovered his love of biology tramping in fields, Louis had long lectured and led field trips not just for advanced students but for dedicated amateurs, especially teachers and children. He insisted that any smart person could become a proficient naturalist. Now, lecturing before large lay audiences as well as professionals painfully aware that they lacked the institutional resources that Louis had tapped in Europe, both his message and his manner — his affable approachability; his encouragement of amateurs; even his self-effacing, out-loud search for the right word, as if showing the thinness of his own education — insisted that an elastic mind, a sharp eye, and direct contact with nature ranked as the natural scientist’s most vital assets. As his years in America strengthened this belief, it came to imbue every aspect of his teaching. He expressed it most notably in his sink-or-swim introduction to comparative anatomy, in which he would give a new student a strange specimen, usually from the sea, to examine for several days during which the student was to observe everything possible but never consult a book. He sometimes forbade books from dissection rooms altogether. The truth lay not in books or inherited knowledge; it stood before you, a work of God.
For a country eager to claim intellectual parity with Europe but keenly aware it lacked a comparable intellectual history or institutional infrastructure, these ideas held immeasurable attraction — the more so, of course, for coming from one of European’s top scientists.
So it was that Louis Agassiz satisfied America’s hunger for someone to raise the torch that Franklin and Jefferson had once carried — a learned figure of international stature who was a peer to Europe’s best, yet distinctly and unapologetically American in spirit. Strange that a new immigrant should be the one to fill this role. Yet Louis Agassiz’s immediate understanding and embrace of America’s energy and independence suited him for the task, while his European training ensured credibility.
Louis could thus resolve, as perhaps no one else could (and as enthusiastically as anyone could hope) Americans’ mixed feelings regarding European learning. On one hand, as many observers (most famously Alexis de Tocqueville) noted, America in the early 1800s exuded confidence that its homegrown vigor could best European sophistication in any arena — military, political, economic, or cultural. Yet anyone paying attention recognized that America lagged Europe horribly in scholarly and scientific pursuits and institutions. Virtually all leading American scholars and scientists of the time went to Europe for their advanced training, and many native observers bemoaned the lack of any vital American intellectual or cultural spirit. Henry Adams, for instance, complained that Americans “had no time for thought; they saw, and could see, nothing beyond their day’s work; … their attitude to the universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish.” Americans’ appreciation of beauty and culture, he felt, was succinctly expressed in Grant’s lament that Venice would be a nice city if it were drained. Adams and others blamed this cultural myopia on the industrial age’s growing materialism. A more prickly assessment came from the Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana, who found the American imagination not merely suppressed but geriatrically sterile. The established strain of American culture at the time — the Euro-imitative arts and sciences against which Whitman, Melville, Emerson and others rebelled — Santayana saw as a “harvest of leaves” by a culture holding “an expurgated and barren conception of life …. [and no] native roots [or] fresh sap.”
“[Even when Americans] made attempts to rejuvenate their minds by broaching native subjects…,” he wrote,
the inspiration did not seem much more American than that of Swift or … Chateaubriand…. If anyone, like Walt Whitman, penetrated to the feelings and images which the American scene was able to breed out of itself,… he misrepresented the minds of cultivated Americans; in them the head as yet did not belong to the trunk.
Louis’s vision of nature study, however, offered a way to connect head, trunk, and soil. Drawing on native materials with energy, optimism, and initiative, naturalists both amateur and professional could create a homegrown alternative to both stale high culture and debased mass culture while making a liberating asset of the country’s lack of educational infrastructure. It was a neat trick, applying to science the celebration of endemic American energy that found literary voice in Whitman. Louis sang a song of scientific self.
Everyone ate it up — even future opponents like the Yale geologist James Dwight Dana and Harvard’s Asa Gray. Though these men knew perfectly well that book learning was as vital as observation, they were enthralled by Agassiz’s stunning memory, quickness of mind, and unrivalled power to rouse interest in natural science. Gray, who accompanied Agassiz on his initial tour down the coast, wrote a friend that Agassiz “charms all, both popular and scientific” and was “as excellent a man as he is a superb naturalist.” The man who would later battle Agassiz over Darwin’s theory of natural selection wrote now that his lectures on embryology showed clearly that nature was formed by something other than just disinterested physical processes.
Reviews like this spurred tremendous demand for Agassiz’s lectures. He had originally planned to give the Lowell lectures and then tour the continent researching its natural history (thus fulfilling his duty to King Ferdinand). But even before he finished the Lowell series, he was getting offers from other institutions vying to land what Jacob Bailey, the naturalist at West Point, called “the big fish Agassiz.” A bidding frenzy ensued, and Louis soon abandoned his plans for King Ferdinand’s continental survey and concentrated on lecturing. In his first year in the U.S., he earned over $8,000 — a huge sum at the time, and more than he’d made in the previous decade in Europe — and was able to pay off all the debts he’d run up over 15 years at Neuchatel. It seemed celebrity paid well.
Louis Agassiz, of course, was not merely famous. He was a genuinely distinguished scientist with a singular ability to inspire. This was not lost on John Lowell and the other members of Harvard University’s corporation (its equivalent of a board of trustees). The university had been hoping to establish a school of science, and here arrived the perfect man to lead it — dynamic, energetic, internationally renowned, and able to raise money effortlessly. Lowell, inquiring gently with Louis and getting a warm response, convinced a fellow textile magnate, Abbott Lawrence, to underwrite a new science school. The Lawrence Scientific School (later absorbed into Harvard’s school of arts and sciences) was thus created in 1847, and Louis made its first professor and effective director.
Eighteen months into his American tenure, then, Louis Agassiz had achieved goals of which he had long dreamed but so far fallen short. He had a prestigious and well-paid teaching position at a major institution; the ability to earn almost unlimited amounts of money and adulation; and near-official status as his country’s first naturalist.
Introduction
Louis Agassiz, Creationist Magpie
*This series of excerpts is an experimental act of re-publication; over the next several week I will run a dozen or so of these, partially serializing the book. Each post will stand on its own as an intriguing story within a larger context: the struggle of some of history’s smartest and most determined people, including Charles Darwin, to figure out how to do science — to look at the world accurately, generate ideas about how it works, and test those ideas in a way that gives you reliable answers. This was usually (certainly not always, as we’ll see) a polite debate. Yet it was also, always, a high-stakes war about what science is, and that war continues today. In this case it revolved around two of the 19th century’s hottest scientific questions: the origin of species, and the origin of coral reefs.
Read what Oliver Sacks and others have to say about Reef Madness.
Buy Reef Madness at your favorite US independent bookstore or at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble, or Google eBook Store.
