Reef madness, p.3
Reef Madness, page 3
The two were now trading jabs through alternating lectures at the Académie des Sciences and the Collège de France. In the face of Cuvier’s repeated attacks on the speculative nature of his arguments, Geoffroy seemed to be losing the larger arguments about both tax onomy and evolution, and for good reason. Cuvier’s notion of embranchments simply seemed to make more sense, particularly in its division of vertebrates from other animals. Anemones and centipedes, after all, strike anyone as different from squirrels and birds. And while evolutionary theory would eventually displace Cuvier’s notion of fixed species, Geoffroy, like all pre-Darwinian evolutionists, could offer no plausible explanation of how evolution occurred. He could only point to results. He had a body–piles of bodies–but no smoking gun. He failed to make a solid case for evolution because he could not identify a process by which it worked. With no dynamic to point to, he lost to the prevailing explanation: Animals were the way they were–variations, similarities, and all–because God made them that way. So Cuvier won, at least for a time.
For Agassiz, who had found the chain-of-being idea attractive while in Munich (his friend Alexander Braun would sign on permanently), the Cuvier-Geoffroy feud revealed how readily an empirically based argument could triumph over abstract theory. This did not mean that empirical arguments lacked grand meaning, at least in taxonomy, for there was significance aplenty in delineating God’s order. Rather it meant that any claim to a large idea, such as the existence of embranchments, should rest on a wealth of tangible, observed evidence showing the idea’s close, demonstrable correspondence to physical reality. If it did, it would beat speculation about hidden dynamics every time.
4
Cuvier’s example confirmed most of Louis’s prejudices and ambitions. The rewards of being “first naturalist” seemed great indeed. Cuvier, a baron by now, enjoyed numerous commissions, titles, and positions, abundant income, and enormous influence. He consumed heartily (his nickname, “the Mammoth,” referred to more than just paleontological interest) and had the world at his feet. Temperamental and impatient, he was said to hold an enlightened despotism as his own political ideal. Yet he knew when to take a knee. When Napoleon rose to power in 1804, Cuvier seamlessly transferred his allegiance to this new ruler, tempering certain religious views accordingly. He did the same when the monarchy replaced Napoléon in 1814 and then a third time when the 1830 revolution deposed the crown. “What servility and baseness has not been shown toward those in power by M. Cuvier!” wrote Stendhal. But it worked. Over the first three decades of the 1800s, no scientist lived better or wielded more clout. He not only stood atop the scientific establishment but held an influential position as a councillor of state (a combination advisor and judge) in France’s administrative judicial system. Cuvier loved it. He exercised his authority with a largesse and ruthlessness that reflected back to him, in both the gratitude of those he helped and the pain of those he hurt, the scope of his own power.
Louis seemed to absorb, as a healthy thing, Cuvier’s entire example. Holding his own in conversation with the city’s most prominent scientists and citizens, eating beyond his means, standing alongside Cuvier at the pinnacle of Paris’s social and scientific worlds, he enjoyed the heady feel of extreme prominence. Here was a model to emulate: an intellectual stance that combined painstaking rigor with a view of the big picture, and a position of power and influence that provided the space, money, materials, and assistance his ambitions demanded.
He was still soaking it up when Cuvier suddenly died of cholera in May 1832. Louis had known him just six months. The relationship ended when it was at its most exciting, expansive, infatuated stage. But rather than fall to earth, Louis would self-consciously continue along that exhilarating arc of encouragement and possibility. Cuvier had confirmed Louis’s opinion of himself as his generation’s greatest talent, and Louis saw no need to seek a second opinion. While he accepted the friendship and guidance of Alexander von Humboldt for a few months after Cuvier’s death, he would never meet another scientist he considered his superior. The torch had been passed. Louis, feeling born to the job, gladly took it in hand.
CHAPTER TWO
Neuchâtel
Alexander Agassiz at age twelve, from a drawing by his mother
I
ALEXANDER AGASSIZ first appeared in a scientific work at age four, when a pen-and-ink drawing of him fishing graced the cover of a volume in his father’s series about central European freshwater fish, Histoire naturelle des poissons d’eau douce de l’Europe central. The illustration was executed by Joseph Dinkel, an artist who worked faithfully and effectively for Louis for more than fifteen years, adding much to Louis’s reputation; his kind disposition also made him beloved company to young Alex. It’s a happy picture, suggesting, as Louis surely recognized, a creative, independent life integrating aesthetic, physical, and intellectual pleasures with family and work. Louis’s letters make it clear that he believed he had created such a life. But as is so often the case with the family pictures we choose to share, Dinkel’s drawing reflected Louis’s most flattering self-conception. Events would prove this bucolic happiness illusory. Covering as it does a work whose authorship was contested and whose production strained Louis’s home life, the picture subverts its own imagery. And the fishing child, this embodiment of innocence and curiosity, would soon find himself cast on inhospitable shores.
2
Most of Louis’s preeminent biographers–people like Jules Marcou, who knew him well personally, and Edward Lurie, who researched him exhaustively–mark Cuvier’s death as a great loss in Louis Agas-siz’s career, for it removed at a critical time the one figure who might have taught him to discipline his energies and restrain his wilder theoretical impulses, things both Louis’s father and Humboldt tried but failed to teach him. While the insight seems accurate, one wonders, given the effusiveness of Louis’s energies, compulsions, and narcissism, if even Cuvier could have curbed him.
It seems safe to say, however, that at least Louis’s earlier career might have gone differently. Had Cuvier lived longer, he probably would have helped Louis secure a position in Paris, where he might have risen to replace Cuvier as a leader of European science, not to mention salon life. As it was, the weeks after Cuvier’s death found Louis in a Paris packed with ambitious prodigies. His only offer was an invitation from Cuvier’s publisher to work with Achille Valenciennes, another Cuvier protégé, to complete the master’s immense fish-classification project. Louis passed, for he was not eager to collaborate on anything when he had Cuvier’s fossil fish project all to himself. (The sheer size of the Valenciennes project may have daunted him too. It would grow to twenty-two volumes, and Valenciennes would die thirty-three years later not having completed it.) Collaboration was not to be Louis’s style. What he wanted were protégés of his own.
As Louis’s luck would have it, his mother soon relayed word of a new college and museum of natural history being formed in Neuchâ-tel, a small city near his hometown of Môtier. Aided by an introduc- tion from Humboldt and an artful letter of his own hinting at pressing offers in Paris, he won the directorship of the museum and the col lege’s natural history curricula. His position would be funded partly by the Prussian king and partly by contributions from the town’s aristocracy who had been rallied by Louis’s uncle, François Mayor.
So in September 1832 Louis Agassiz, twenty-five years old, returned home having realized many of his early academic and professional goals. He eagerly took up his new duties. He found he could give brilliant lectures with minimal preparation. This left him more time for writing Poissons fossiles, the study Cuvier had passed him, and to establish a natural history society into which he invited many of the town’s leading citizens–an astute move in generating more excitement about his presence. He also organized children’s outings and evening lectures for the public at the museum, making it a vital and exciting new civic institution.
In the relatively small arena of Neuchâtel–a regional market center of around six thousand people–this brilliant young professor instantly stood out; if he wasn’t yet first naturalist of Europe, he certainly was of Neuchâtel. Agassiz enjoyed this experience so much that he turned down an offer, only a few weeks into his new job, to take a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, a more prestigious institution where he had been a student six years earlier. He realized he liked starting things. Besides, he and Neuchâtel were infatuated with each other. Louis had charmed the town’s financial and civic leaders, and for the time he felt he could get anything he wanted. Few could engender enthusiasm for the future as readily as Louis Agassiz did, and few enjoyed being adored more than he.
He had been working a more personal charm for several years on Cécile Braun, the sister of his old classmate and fencing partner Alexander Braun. He’d fallen for Cécile while a guest at the Braun house, in Carlsruhe, Germany, when he and Alexander were studying in nearby Heidelberg. Having grown closer on subsequent visits over the years, the two had been waiting only for Louis to find stable employment to marry. The time had come.
Their engagement initially raised mixed emotions in Cécile’s family. Alexander Braun, who had spent several years around Louis, recognized that while he was generous, affectionate, and rarely short on cheer, he also held an inflated view of himself and what he could take on, traits that could overwhelm a spouse, particularly one as gentle and shy as Cécile. Yet Braun, succumbing to the charm to which no one seemed immune and impressed by Louis’s rise in Paris, swallowed those worries, and in the fall of 1832 he and his parents endorsed the engagement. The couple married a year later in Carls-ruhe, and Cécile joined Louis in Neuchâtel.
Their prospects seemed good. Though Louis earned only a free apartment, board, and the equivalent of around four hundred dollars a year (about eight thousand dollars today), his potential seemed unlimited. Both his and Cécile’s families and the town’s leaders seemed to share his ambitions for himself and the new museum. In a pattern that would hold throughout his life, his optimism and the proven generosity of others made him confident that he could raise any necessary resources. Both his own family and his mentors, including Cuvier and Humboldt, had already thrown money his way when he ran short of funds to pay the artist Dinkel or obtain specimens. He kept making big plans and, through a combination of hard work, good luck, and charm, realizing them; he thus convinced him self and others that he could execute ever larger plans.
His home life held similar promise. In Cécile, Louis had found a woman and a family that broadened his world both culturally and financially. Cécile, raised in a cultured upper-middle-class family, had experience in music, art, and literature that Louis coveted. He was enchanted by her home in Carlsruhe, a large house with spacious grounds where an afternoon might be spent studying botanical specimens from the nearby oak forest and the evening singing four-part Bach chorales. Cécile’s talent as an artist enthralled him. In an early bonding experience, he sat (one must guess cheerfully) while she drew his portrait. And though he already employed Dinkel to draw his specimens, that work expanded with every new research or publishing project. The idea of Cécile’s helping with specimen illustration excited them both and gave them a sense of joint endeavor. It hurt not a whit that her family had money.
Alexander von Humboldt, one of the few people Louis looked up to, approved. In a letter congratulating Louis on his engagement, he wrote, “It is not enough to be praised and recognized as a great and profound naturalist; to this one must add domestic happiness as well.” In the same note he gave Louis a prod, by way of positive rein forcement, to curb his megalomania: “It is a pleasure to watch the growing renown of those who are dear to us; and who should merit success more than you, whose elevation of character is proof against the temptations of literary self-love?” If there was a hint and a warning in that compliment, Louis seemed to miss it.
Over the next decade or so, amid the distractions of running a curriculum and establishing a new museum, Louis Agassiz performed the best and most substantial scientific work of his career, making major contributions with his fish fossil study and then his famous ice age theory.
Louis worked hard on Poissons fossiles, the taxonomic survey of fossil fish he published in five installments beginning in 1833. Having mastered the collections in Paris, Munich, and Heidelberg, he traveled Europe examining those elsewhere, a tour that gave him a comprehensive knowledge of virtually all known fossil fish and the museums that housed them–and let him impress everyone with his sharp eye, quick mind, flawless memory, and tremendous gift for talk. These travels created keen anticipation for the book.
The first volume seemed to confirm these expectations. Louis’s descriptions and classifications, illustrated with Dinkel’s exquisite drawings, beautifully realized the taxonomist’s task. And if the book’s gentle insistence that this order contradicted any notions of evolution seems archaic today, it did not then; rather, the work’s synthesis of taxonomy, comparative anatomy, and paleontology added weight to Louis’s assertion that the evidence he had gathered, with significant gaps between seemingly similar species, showed that “species do not pass insensibly one into another” but “appear and disappear un expectedly, without direct relations with their precursors.” The project met warm reception in all quarters. Adam Sedgwick, a leading geologist and a vital early mentor to Charles Darwin, would write Charles Lyell, the world’s most prominent geologist, that he thought Poissons“by far the most important work now on hand in the geological field.”* Lyell, whose Principles of Geology was causing a reevaluation of geological history contrary to Agassiz’s view, also praised the work, saying that Agassiz’s “knowledge of natural history surprises me the more I know of him.”
Poissons, emerging over the following decade, made a strange document. Despite its taxonomic breadth and descriptive acuity Agassiz’s use of a taxonomic shortcut–he categorized fish using the external features and scales, rather than by the more laborious but exacting method of comparing their internal anatomy–somewhat compromised the long-term value of the classifications. But if its tax onomy did not hold up as well as Cuvier’s, the book greatly advanced fish paleontology. The work’s essay portions, meanwhile, used an early version of the circular creationist argument that Louis would later stick to so ferociously, an argument that, despite his professed allegiance to a strict inductivism, climbs far out on a speculative limb. Like any decent scientist or curious human, Louis could not resist seeking patterns in what he saw. And like Cuvier, he believed the taxonomic evidence showed no sign of transmutation and proved that species “changed” only by a series of mass extinctions and subsequent re-creations–a sort of global delete-and-replace pattern left by a God who revised his own work.
This vision raised an obvious and troubling question: What did God use for these waves of extinction and creation? Noah’s flood could account for only one such revision (and hardly explained fish extinctions), and the fossil record showed at least several successions of similar species. This suggested either a continuous evolution-like progression or (if you were inclined to see waves of extinction and re creation) at least several massive, worldwide revisions. If you wanted to buttress creationism with science, as Agassiz did, you had to come up with more than just a single catastrophe.
Agassiz soon stumbled on what seemed a likely answer. In one of his greatest contributions, he pioneered the idea of the ice age, expanding it from glacial studies in the Alps and receiving primary credit (albeit disputed) for a concept that would explain a huge range of phenomena. His development of the theory also showed a pen chant for drama and controversy that would emerge repeatedly thereafter.
In the summer of 1836, Johann de Charpentier, a mining engineer and amateur geologist who ran a salt mine in the Rhône Valley, invited Louis to vacation at his house in nearby Vaud. He said he had some geology he wanted to show him. Louis had heard about Char-pentier’s odd ideas: that the grinding action of glaciers was responsible for turning the Alps and surrounding areas into such grooved terrain, and that glaciers also created the landscape features that we now know as glacial moraines and erratics, the fields of detritus and huge boulders, respectively, that in many areas seem to have fallen from the sky, so detached are they from any likely point of origin. Charpentier had been introduced to this theory in 1829 by a younger colleague, Ignace Venetz, who had first heard it in 1820 from a chamois-hunter named Jean-Pierre Parraudin; Parraudin had hit upon a rough glacial-age theory as the answer to why so many boulders sat perched on hilltops. Charpentier had resisted this notion when Parraudin pitched it to him years before, but he converted when Venetz, having taken it up, elaborated it convincingly at a lecture Charpentier attended. In his subsequent walks around the Alps he became utterly convinced that glaciers had once covered most of the Alps, carving deep valleys and leaving boulders and moraines strewn about. Over the early 1830s he expounded the idea as widely as he could in talks and meetings.
In a series of hikes that summer of 1836, Charpentier slowly sold the idea to Louis, who was also initially quite skeptical. Agassiz slowly overruled his reservations because, as many would experience in the years ahead, the glacial theory provided convincing explanations–a shock of recognition and clarity–for numerous landscape phenomena. It radically altered one’s view of the earth. Striated and polished rocks, boulders left in strange places, gravel ridges, block- shaped depressions, and countless other oddities all suddenly made sense. The ice age was one of those ideas that make everything fall into place and let you see things you hadn’t seen before. In that sense, it met the standard we generally apply today for a useful theory: It provided the most plausible explanation for a breadth of data.
