This is the sixth installment of an abridged version of my book Reef Madness: Alexander Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and the Meaning of Coral.
The prior installment described how Charles Darwin seduced Harvard botanist Asa Gray, enlisting him in defeating Alexander’s father, the famous creationist zoologist Louis, in a series of debates about Darwin’s theory of evolution. The subsequent chapter in the book, Transmutation, which I’m skipping in this series, found Alexander running Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology; investing in a copper mine in Calumet, Michigan, that would make him rich; visiting and befriending Charles Darwin in England; and moving quietly, during the 1860s, to Darwin’s camp in the epic dispute Darwin had with Louis over the origin of species. Alexander’s embrace of Darwin’s theory of evolution, along with the publication of his first major work, Revision of the Echini, established him as a substantial scientist in his own right. Yet as we’ll see in this excerpt, taken from the book’s eighth chapter, Selection, Alexander emerged from his father’s shadow only to have a much greater darkness descend upon him.
© David Dobbs, 2011. All rights reserved.
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Having tackled Darwinism’s practical implications, Alex forged ahead dissecting, classifying, analyzing, and writing. Writing Revision of the Echini was a huge job that taxed his energies and intellect. Yet the three or four years on which he concentrated on the book were the happiest of his life, partly because he finally had the time and independence to simply work. Touring Europe had reinvigorated his health and scientific enthusiasm, and when he returned he found the museum running so smoothly that he had only to serve as advisor rather than day-to-day manager. The Calumet mine was also “in apple pie order and running as smooth as clockwork.”
His only real negative distraction was Louis’s health. Louis had suffered a small stroke in 1869 before Alex left for Europe, and his energies were returning only gradually. When Alex returned, his father was coming to the museum each day for just an hour or two, after which he would return home to rest, sometimes getting more work done there. He was hardly the “steam engine,” as Alex and Theo so often called him, of former years. This naturally worried Alex. But as Louis gained strength over the following months, his reduced energy actually proved a bit of a blessing, for a less energetic Louis made less trouble. He now seemed to concentrate more on his main work, that of teaching and his latest investigations, and less on battling Darwin or launching projects that Theo and Alex would have to quell. He was less riotous.
Alex finally had the personal, intellectual, and financial independence to concentrate on his own work and to enjoy his own life. The home he and Anna rented, Charles Eliot Norton’s mansion known as Shady Hill, was spacious and comfortable, and the growing income from Calumet relieved them of financial worry and (courtesy of hired help) not a few chores. They were free to work and enjoy their children (now out of diapers and the most labor-intensive years) and friends. Summers they spent on the shore, renting a different house each year. Alex, who loved horses, taught the boys to ride during these summers, fitting it in amid more field and bookwork on Echini. The young family spent a lot of time with Theo and Mimi. The two couples understood each other thoroughly. The two brothers-in-law were almost as close as the sisters, for they had known each other now half their lives. The bonds between the families were further strengthened by the nearness in age of George to Cora, Mimi and Theo’s daughter, a much-adored child in whom Theo took immense pleasure.
After a life marked by unexpected setbacks and turmoil, Alex felt a happiness so blooming that he feared to trust it. He particularly feared that illness would again strike him or his family. It was a reasonable fear in that pre-antibiotic time. In the fourteen years since Alex had moved to the U.S., epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and flu had killed many thousands, and the previous eight years alone had brought recurring lethal outbreaks of typhus, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and yellow fever. His father’s ailments were never far from his mind, and at some level his mother’s last illness doubtless stayed near too. Occasionally there were close reminders. Early in 1873, while Theo and Mimi and Cora were traveling in Europe, Mimi, who eleven years before had become dangerously weak after bearing Cora in Florence, fell seriously ill there again, probably with the flu that was then claiming many in both Europe and the U.S. In the lags of transatlantic correspondence, Alex and Anna often feared the worst. When in March they heard that Mimi had pulled clear, Alex felt the relief of someone who had dodged a scripted fate. “Every thing seems so prosperous,” he wrote Theo in expressing his great relief,” that I feel as if some of us would have to pay a heavy penalty … for all our happiness.”
When the penalty first came, it struck cruelly. In July, Theo and Mimi were still traveling in Europe when Cora took sick. She likely contracted the flu strain that had threatened her mother. Cora, however, did not pull free. After an illness of two weeks, she died at the Hague.
It took the Lymans two months to bring their daughter’s body back to Cambridge for burial. Theo, always emotive, was still devastated when they arrived. For weeks he wept at any reminder of his daughter’s absence. He had frequently recorded in his diaries and letters acutely observed descriptions of Cora learning and playing and growing — her hopscotch games with new Italian neighbors, comic language miscues with French playmates, her proud mastery of the first German songs she memorized and translated. (Theo recorded in his diary the entire songs, in both languages.) Now, actively prodding his remembrances to keep Cora present, he filled his diary with heart-rent expressions of grief. As the months passed, he expressed Quentin Compson-like laments over time’s erosion of the pain that was all he had left of his daughter.
The outlines of the painful images are growing less sharp; a sort of perspective begins to invest what once was present. As … the reality of my maimed life impresses itself with the dull beat of a pendulum, there is less to bring up and give force to the loss.… The vivid grief is followed by a state which well may be called “forlorn.” To grieve is to live, to be forlorn is a negative existence. “Think of what you have left” — that is the old saying. I indeed have much left — but is life so sweet that we should seek to hold to it when one half is lost? I don’t see much chance of dying — my health was never better — and I have no wish to die so long as I can help Mimi.
Theo, who had escaped the Civil War with body and spirit intact, barely survived his daughter’s death, and it’s clear he barely cared to. A year after Cora’s death, the birth of another child, a healthy son, revived only the most tentative faith. (They would lose another child to miscarriage two years hence.) “That little boy of mine!” Theo fearfully exulted of his second child. “All my love for Cora attaches to him, as her representative, and more, that seems specially his. He may fade in a night; but then too, he may live to close my eyes. Let us hope for the good, ever ready to be resigned to evil.”
Alex, with Cora’s lifelong playmate George, carried Cora’s bier to the grave. In the months following , Alex watched in pain as his best friend, long a bright light in his as in many lives, suffered precisely the erasure of happiness Alex had feared. The penalty had been levied.
It soon struck strike much closer. Some ten weeks after Alex helped Theo and Mimi bury Cora, Louis fell ill. Louis had often been sickly over the previous five years, but he had felt better for months now and had been particularly vigorous since summer, when an innovative natural history course he gave to several dozen public school teachers had provided the thrill, seemingly lost to days past, of lighting the fire of inspiration in new followers. He had returned to Cambridge that fall of 1873 full of plans, igniting many burners at once. He even wrote a new rejoinder to Darwin for the Atlantic. He seemed almost back to his old steam-engine self.
Alex and Anna saw all this from close range, for in November, having vacated Shady Hill for the returning Charles Eliot Norton, they had moved back into the Quincy Street house for what was to be a short stay while they looked for another place of their own. On December 5, Alex, Anna, and the boys helped Louis celebrate Liz Cary’s birthday with a party that included Alex’s sisters, Pauline and Ida, and their husbands, Quincy Shaw and Henry Higginson, as well as several of the Cary family. Spirits flowed and ran high, and Louis even indulged in a forbidden cigar. The following morning, however, Louis complained of feeling “strangely sleepy” soon after getting to the museum, and he returned home and went to bed. When Cary could not rouse him that afternoon, she summoned Alex from the museum. Though Louis would regain consciousness a few times, he could neither rise nor speak. He had suffered a massive stroke. Alex, Liz, and Anna took turns tending him, keeping an increasingly tense and hopeless vigil.
He died after eight days, on Sunday, December 14, 1873. Though Louis Agassiz had lost his intellectual following, he still held a large place in many hearts; the outpouring was extraordinary. Countless elegies and front-page headlines mourned his passing; the Boston papers the next day were rimmed in black. The funeral, held four days later, drew an overflow crowd, as all of Boston and Cambridge seemed to come out. In the foremost rows near Alex, Ida, and Pauline sat not only Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard, but Henry Wilson, the Vice-President of the United States.
Missing from the funeral, however, was Anna Russell Agassiz. On the last night of Louis’s life, exhausted from tending him, she had taken a bad cold. It had not relented and in fact had grown much worse, with an intense headache and a fever setting in on Monday. Alex, worried almost sick himself, had hardly left the house but to tend to his father’s funeral business and then to go to funeral itself. Now, rushing home from the interment, he found Anna sicker than ever.
By this point he feared she had contracted typhoid fever, the latest outbreak of which was killing many. But a doctor’s exam the next day found a different or possibly an additional culprit: Pneumonia had filled her left lung. This was Thursday. For three days, in a struggle that must have seemed nightmarishly familiar to Alex from his mother’s Freiburg denouement, Anna lay with labored, rattling breath. Her coughs threw blood. On Sunday the rattle spread to the right lung. A second doctor was summoned, and after conferring, these two doctors, among Boston’s finest, prescribed large quantities of brandy. It was a standard cure-all of the time. But it almost certainly weakened her, depressing her heart, lungs, and immune system — everything that needed to rise to defeat the infection.
The desperately optimistic consensus the next day was that Anna was not much worse. They dared hope that the left lung might clear in time to save life. But that evening she began to fade. By midnight she was gone. Alex stood and watched her expire, stunned to numbness. The father of the long shadow, who two decades earlier had left him alone to tend his dying mother, had reached from the grave to claim also his wife.
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Prior excerpts:
Reef Madness 1: Louis Agassiz, Creationist Magpie | Wired Science …
Reef Madness 2: The One Darwin Really DID Get Wrong
Reef Madness 3: Louis Agassiz, TED Wet Dream, Conquers America
Reef Madness 4: Alexander Agassiz Comes of Age
Reef Madness 5: How Charles Darwin Seduced Asa Gray
Buy Reef Madness at your favorite US independent bookstore or at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble, or Google eBook Store.
