Reef madness, p.6
Reef Madness, page 6
Cécile’s brother took in Alex and his sisters, and an exchange of letters across the Atlantic soon settled their fates. Louis, busy convincing Harvard to build him a museum, could not come fetch his children. The girls went to live with their aunts in Neuchâtel while Alex stayed in Freiburg with his uncle. What would have become of Alex had his mother lived? Quite possibly he would have stayed in Freiburg, become a naturalist, likely quite prominent, and had a distinguished and perhaps even a brilliant career in Europe.
In spring of 1849, however, Alex’s cousin on his father’s side, Dr. Charles Mayor, decided to move to the United States, and it was arranged that Alex would meet him in Paris and sail with him from Le Havre to Boston. Though his feelings on leaving Freiburg can only be imagined, his actions as reported by his son George seventy-five years later provide some hint. At the Freiburg train station, he removed his violin from its case, set it on the platform, and smashed it beneath his feet.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cambridge
I
ARRIVING IN New York in June 1849, thirteen-year-old Alexander Agassiz entered a world sharply different from 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 enduring 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–suggested a way for his vibrant but insecure adopted nation 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 Henry Wads-worth Longfellow to Henry David 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 twenty-five years after Louis’s death, no American since Benjamin Franklin had so embodied the country’s spirit or captured its imagination.
Louis Agassiz with his friend and ally Benjamin Peirce, the Harvard mathematician. Peirce is pointing out the location of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the globe. In the 1850s, the two men were unchallenged in the world of American science.
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Louis’s American renown 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 gregarious 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 United States 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 everything going on in all current natural science and could readily discuss the philosophical questions raised. He showed a flattering curiosity about everyone’s work and seemed instantly to 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. 2
Louis cemented this impression of amiable savant with the Low ell 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 five thousand seats–again and again. The lectures, which he titled “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. 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 some thing 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, and 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 said, could only be the work of God. What else could account for 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 play a hand. But evolution was not only unfounded (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 at once enticingly progressive and safely devout. Like the Covariant 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. He 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 but 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 master a discipline. Like a music teacher who kindly insists 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 chubbiness 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, as he lectured before large lay audiences as well as professionals painfully mindful 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 that it lacked a comparable intellectual history or institutional infrastructure, these ideas held immeasurable attraction– the more so, of course, for coming from one of Europe’s top scientists.
So it was that Louis Agassiz satisfied America’s hunger for some one 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 … without native roots [or] fresh sap.”
“[Even when Americans] made attempts to rejuvenate their minds by broaching native subjects,” Santayana 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, presented 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 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 unrivaled 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 lec- tures. 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 United States, he earned more than eight thou sand dollars–a huge sum at the time, 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 fifteen years at Neuchâtel. 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, internation ally 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 became 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 adoptive country’s first naturalist.
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When Alex arrived to join him, he found his father riding the headiest surge of his American success. Louis was also elated over the woman he introduced to Alex as his stepmother-to-be, Elizabeth Cabot Cary
Well educated, musical, bilingual, attractive, warm hearted, and twenty-seven years old (as near in age to Alex as to Louis), Liz Cary was about the best thing that could have happened not just to Louis but to Alex. By all accounts she took Alex to heart immediately, and he, grateful after his recent trials for such an unequivocal commitment, remained dedicated to her all his life. In later years he called her his best friend as well as his mother. As for Louis, marrying Liz Cary furnished private stability and happiness for himself and his children and secured his acceptance into the highest layers of Boston society. For Elizabeth Cabot Cary was born of the Cabot family, one of the richest and most established of the oft-mingled clans (Cabots, Lowells, Feltons Shaws, and others) who dominated Boston finance and society.
Liz Cary also possessed astonishing grace, intelligence, empathy strength, and energy, and she managed to enhance and enjoy Louis’s ambitions while curbing his domestic excesses. She greatly stabilized (one is tempted to say civilized) the home in which Alex lived. Upon his son’s arrival, Louis’s house held a menagerie that included snakes, an eagle, and a bear that was a gift from Henry Thoreau. Presumably a symbol of nature’s noble simplicity, the bear simplified nothing, though it did offer unpredictable entertainment, as when during a dinner party it slipped its chains in the basement, raided the wine cask, and stumbled upstairs to disrupt the party. (It soon graced the dissecting table.) When Cary moved in, the animals and all of Louis’s aides save Burkhardt moved out, and Alex, soon joined by his sisters, settled into the best-regulated home they ever had. (Some animals eluded immediate capture. Several weeks after moving in, Cary found a fugitive snake in one of her shoes. Louis, hearing her shout of protest, said he was wondering where that snake had got to.)
