Naturalist, was born at Motier, in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, 28th May 1807, and studied at Bienne, Lausanne, Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich. He graduated in medicine in 1830, his Latin description of the “Fishes of Brazil” having the year before elicited a warm encomium from Cuvier. In 1831–32 he worked in Paris, and in 1832 accepted a professorship at Neuchâtel. In 1833 he commenced the publication of his “Researches on the Fossil Fishes,” and in 1836 undertook those studies on the glacial phenomena of the Alps whose fruit was his “Études sur les Glaciers” (1840) and his “Système Glaciaire” (1847). In 1839 he published a “Natural History of the Fresh-water Fishes of Central Europe.” In 1840–44 he and his assistants spent the summers at a station on the Alps, and in the following autumn he visited the Scottish Highlands. In 1846–48 he lectured with success in the principal cities of the United States, and in 1848 was elected to the chair of Natural History at Harvard. He spent the winter of 1850–51 in an expedition to the Florida Reefs. In 1851–52 he taught at Charleston, S. C., and lectured at Washington, before the Smithsonian Institution. In 1855–63 he and his daughters conducted a young ladies’ school at Cambridge; he declined chairs at Zurich and Paris, and received the Order of the Legion of Honour. Of his “Contributions to the Natural History of the United States,” he lived to issue only four of ten 4to vols. To a Museum of Comparative Zoology, established at Harvard in 1858, Agassiz gave all of his collections; and four years of incessant work here so undermined his health that he decided upon a trip to Brazil, ultimately transformed into an important scientific expedition, described in “A Journey in Brazil.” He died at Cambridge, 14th Dec. 1873. See “Life and Correspondence,” edited by Mrs. Agassiz (1886), the monograph by C. F. Holder (1892), and “Life, Letters, and Works,” by Jules Marcou (1896).

Personal

  Agassiz is very ill—probably dying. What a different world it will be to us without him. Such a rich, expansive, loving nature.

  He was not of that type of scholars whose shrivelled faces and whose withered forms declare the neglect of exercise, and the misuse of food; nor was he one who gained by stimulants extraordinary force. He possessed what might be called a commanding presence, a favorable personal equation, a magnetic influence, a manly beauty, or an easy dignity—a quality not to be defined, but everywhere appreciated, which may be in-bred, yet must be first in-born. He came of good descent, having a mother of rare intellectual qualities, and on his father’s side an ancestry of six generations of Protestant ministers, going back to the Huguenot refugees. But his was not the parentage of wealth or fashion, and the narrow circumstances of his early life quickened his industry, his patience, and fitted him forever after to sympathise with and encourage those who have high aims and shallow purses.

  To Agassiz applies the familiar saying that he was winning in his ways; nay, more than this, the ways were often irresistible. He was a French Swiss, and in him was developed in its highest degree the Gallic power of pleasing. No man was more set in his aims; no man more determined and courageous in their pursuit; but he had not the Saxon style of riding rough-shod over people who were in the path. He worked his way through the crowd of the world deftly; and, when he arrived, as he always did, at the wished-for place, it was with a kindly smile on his face, and accompanied by the good-will even of his opponents. His kindliness was inseparable from his nature, and was a force in itself. It was shown by his love of children and his inexhaustible patience with them, and by his toleration of dull or ignorant people. Behind this came his enthusiasm, like the line after its skirmishers; his kindliness charmed, his enthusiasm overwhelmed and carried off captive. These qualities gave an extraordinary play to a face which would otherwise have been massive, and a boyish twinkle to an eye which had not been a boy’s for half a century. His powers were all mobilized; none were reserved, or shut up, or in places of difficult access; therefore he was the most brilliant of talkers. Although cheerful and fond of laughter, he was not exactly humorous; and, singularly enough, was incapable of comprehending the ludicrous mixture of exaggeration and contradiction which we call a joke.

  Agassiz was one of the most brilliant men of his time. Young, handsome, of an athletic constitution, gifted with a captivating eloquence, his spirit was animated with an insatiable curiosity, his memory excellent, his perspicacity rare and very keen, and his way of judging and coördinating facts highly philosophical in its tendency.

  On his modest tomb, in Cambridge, under the hallowed shades of Mount Auburn Cemetery, a huge boulder of solid granite, transported from the glacier of the Aar, the theatre of his glorious investigations, fitly marks the resting place of his mortal remains; but Agassiz’s memory will live in the hearts of all those who have known him well, and his name will shine forever in a high place in the Temple of Science.

  With his large, generous, and sensitive countenance, suggesting that of an intellectualized god Pan.

  Teaching was a passion with him, and his power over his pupils might be measured by his own enthusiasm. He was, intellectually as well as socially, a democrat in the best sense. He delighted to scatter broadcast the highest results of thought and research, and to adapt them even to the youngest and most uninformed minds. In his later American travels he would talk of glacial phenomena to the driver of a country stage-coach among the mountains, or to some workman, splitting rock at the roadside, with as much earnestness as if he had been discussing problems with a brother geologist; he would take the common fisherman into his scientific confidence, telling him the intimate secrets of fish-structure or fish-embryology, till the man in his turn grew enthusiastic and began to pour out information from the stores of his own rough and untaught habits of observation. Agassiz’s general faith in the susceptibility of the popular intelligence, however untrained, to the highest truths of nature, was contagious, and he created or developed that in which he believed.

  Among the chief scientific names of the middle decades of the nineteenth century the name of Agassiz will always stand forth in full prominence with a certain brilliant and melancholy glory all its own. To few men does science owe more; from few men did its main achievement in the present age receive more steadfast, sturdy, and unreasoning opposition…. It was his fate to leave the Word of God and serve tables; but, in truth, his life’s work was already finished. He had fairly reached the end of his tether. With the publication of Darwin’s theory, he declined from the position of an accepted and respected scientific leader to that of a recalcitrant and reactionary scientific heresiarch. He could not digest the new doctrines. “I detest them,” Sedgwick had written to him long before, “because I think them untrue.” A strange perversion of the genuine fact: they thought them untrue because they detested them. In all Agassiz’s violent denunciations on this cardinal point we nowhere come across one single reason, one definite argument, one gleam of the dry light of logic. Mere prejudice governed his conviction. Unhappily too—and see here how error in belief necessarily leads up to error in action—Agassiz was induced by his theoretic views on specific fixity into that pestilent heresy of asserting the total distinctness of the negro from the white man, thus directly playing into the hands of the unspeakable and doomed pro-slavery party. Such an error was the more unpardonable, because he had been in the south, and knew the negro; and the man who, knowing the negro, denies his essential community with ourselves, proves himself thereby a bad systematist, a worse psychologist, and a worse humanitarian. Of evolutionism he said cheerily “I trust to outlive this mania also.”

  The marvel of Agassiz, and a never-ceasing source of wonder and delight to his friends and companions, was the union in his individuality of this solidity, breadth, and depth of mind with a joyousness of spirit, and immense overwhelming geniality of disposition, which flooded every company he entered with the wealth of his own opulent nature. Placed at the head of a table, with a shoulder of mutton before him, he so carved the meat that every guest was flattered into the belief that the host had given him the best piece. His social power exceeded that of the most brilliant conversationalists and of the most delicate epicures; for he was not only fertile in thoughts, but wise in wines and infallible in matters of fish and game. It was impossible to place him in any company where he was out of place. The human nature in him fell into instinctive relations with every kind and variety of human nature outside of him.

  Agassiz was a little above the average height, although not tall. He was squarely built, with broad shoulders and a powerful and well-proportioned body, and with remarkably large, and at the same time well-formed hands, which he always used most skilfully. They were the hands of an artist or of a naturalist, ready to use the pencil, the hammer, the scalpel, or the microscope, and his manner of shaking hands was very cordial and friendly. He stood firmly, though his feet were rather small in comparison with his herculean structure, and seemed formed for walking; indeed, he was all his life a capital pedestrian, both on level ground and among the Alpine mountains. His head was simply magnificent, his forehead large and well developed; and his brilliant, intelligent, and searching eyes can be best described by the word fascinating, while his mouth and somewhat voluptuous lips were expressive, and in perfect harmony with an aquiline nose and well-shaped chin. His hair was chestnut color and rather thin, especially on the top of his head; indeed, after he was thirty-six years old he showed signs of baldness, which greatly increased after his fiftieth year. The only part of Agassiz’s body which was not in harmony with the rest was his short neck, which gave him the appearance of carrying his head on his shoulders,—a defect which he possessed in common with Napoleon Bonaparte. It was his weak point, and the part which failed first. He was easily moved to tears and at times cried like a child. He had spells of laughing, which sometimes seemed forced, but which were perfectly spontaneous. It was almost impossible for him to conceal his emotions. This remark applies more especially to the first forty years of his life; later, he was less apt to show his feelings.

  If ever a man made nature give up her secrets, that man was Agassiz. He was large, hearty, and most agreeable. His sympathy amounted to enthusiasm. He had polite French manners, and left you with the impression that you had contributed very largely to his stock of information…. The nation was listening with hand behind her ear, and Nature threw her sea-urchins and starfish and every fish suspected of any eccentricity at his feet. He gave lectures all over the country, and told me that he could invoke sleep when he needed it, even to sleeping when standing up. His health seemed to be perfect. He gave one the idea of an immense and very agreeable boy who somehow had come to know everything, not by the usual hard penance of learning it at a school, but by intuition.

  He 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 those who came into relations with him. His vast knowledge of scientific facts, and his ready command of them for all educational purposes, his enthusiasm for science and the diffusion of it, even his fascinating way of imparting it to others, had even less to do with his popularity than the magnetism of his presence, and the sympathetic faculty which enabled him to find at once the plane on which he should meet every one with whom he had to deal.

  The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be seen in the shady walks of Cambridge, to which for me they lent a Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself, a few years ago, I felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin, and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization, and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but love of the place.

General

  It is delightful to hear all that he says on Agassiz: how very singular it is that so eminently clever a man, with such immense knowledge on many branches of Natural History, should write as he does. Lyell told me that he was so delighted with one of his (Agassiz) lectures on progressive development, &c., &c., that he went to him afterwards and told him, “that it was so delightful, that he could not help all the time wishing it was true.” I seldom see a Zoological paper from North America, without observing the impress of Agassiz’s doctrines—another proof, by the way, of how great a man he is.

  He possesses not merely the talent of observation, but its genius; and hence his ability to perform the enormous tasks which he imposes on his industry. His mind is eminently large, sound, fertile, conscientious, and sagacious, quick and deep in its insight, wide in the range of its argumentation, capable equally of the minutest microscopic scrutiny and the broadest generalizations, independent of schools and systems, and inspired by that grand and ennobling love of truth which is serenely superior to fear, interest, vanity, ambition, or the desire of display.

  Prof. Agassiz is a naturalist who is justly world-renowned for his achievements. His contributions to geology, to paleontology, and to systematic zoology, have been such as to place him in a very high rank among contemporary naturalists. Not quite in the highest place, I should say; for, apart from all questions of theory, it is probable that Mr. Darwin’s gigantic industry, his wonderful thoroughness and accuracy as an observer, and his unrivalled fertility of suggestion, will cause him in the future to be ranked along with Aristotle, Linnæus, and Cuvier; and upon this high level we cannot place Prof. Agassiz. Leaving Mr. Darwin out of the account, we may say that Prof. Agassiz stands in the first rank of contemporary naturalists. But any exceptional supremacy in this first rank can by no means be claimed for him. Both for learning and for sagacity, the names of Gray, Wyman, Huxley, Hooker, Wallace, Lubbock, Lyell, Vogt, Haeckel, and Gegenbaur, are quite as illustrious as the name of Agassiz; and we may note, in passing, that these are the names of men who openly indorse and defend the Darwinian theory…. 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. Asa Gray…. Agassiz has long been accustomed to making profoundly dark metaphysical phrase do the work which properly belongs to observation and deduction.

  He became a master of English composition, and spoke the language not only with fluency, but with a voluble eloquence which was peculiarly his own. He studied the modes of thought among the people, and learned to know in what they differed from the European. His family ties, his household, his associates were of the country; and yet, after all, he was unchanged. A genius like his could put itself in communication with many and different people; it could grow also, but it could not change.

  The history of his work in the twenty-five years of his life in this country is too familiar to require a detailed statement; it is sufficient to say that for many years he was esteemed by universal consent the foremost savant in the United States and the peer of the greatest of the brotherhood in Europe. It should be added that the recent rapid growth of popular interest in science and the establishment and gratifying progress of many scientific institutions in this country are fairly attributable to his example and influence. Long before his emigration to America Agassiz had become a famous author, and had won an enviable fame in connection with the Glacial Theory, which he promulgated in 1837.

  The name of Agassiz, for twenty years intimately connected with the history of science in America, has nevertheless retained its popularity in Switzerland, where his works have a great celebrity. It is in our country that he was born, in our country he acquired renown, and Switzerland can never forget that he is among the number of her children. Without other resource than his intelligence and his energy, he rose to the first rank among the eminent men of science of our country…. The work he executed in the field of zoology and of paleontology is of very high importance. He possessed the double merit of accomplishing great things himself, and of knowing how to make science popular without diminishing its prestige…. In Switzerland, in Germany, in England, in America, in every country where he took up his abode he made himself the center of the scientific movement and succeeded in interesting the public.

  Agassiz was born a naturalist as Raphael was born a painter. Nature was his first and last love; to live with her and study her was his life. His allegiance to her was unreserved. To be false to nature, or to belittle her—to warp her teachings, or to set them aside—was an offense which he resented almost as a personal one to himself. One of his last sayings (in the Atlantic Monthly) was that “philosophers and theologians have still to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle.” Nature was his main teacher. From her he knew God as a personal mind; all wise, all powerful. Each specific form of plant or animal was to him a thought of God. The life system was God’s connected system of thought, realized by His power in time and space. These forms were not the result of blind physical forces. To these he conceded no power to produce any change in their permanent specific types. New species were new creations. Hence his constant and resolute opposition to Darwinism and to all evolution hypotheses. This zoölogical view he applied equally to mankind. Though a believer in the psychological unity of mankind, he maintained the doctrine of an original variety in the different types of man.

  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.” To this thoroughly theistic conception he joined the scientific deduction which he had already been led to draw, that the animal species of each geological age, or even stratum, were different from those preceding and following, and also unconnected by natural derivation. And his very last published words reiterated his steadfast conviction that “there is no evidence of a direct descent of later from earlier species in the geological succession of animals.” Indeed, so far as we know, he would not even admit that such “thoughts of the Creator” as these might have been actualized in the natural course of events. If he had accepted such a view, and if he had himself apprehended and developed in his own way the now well-nigh assured significance of some of his early and pregnant generalizations, the history of the doctrine of development would have been different from what it is, a different spirit and another name would have been prominent in it, and Agassiz would not have passed away while fighting what he felt to be—at least for the present—a losing battle. It is possible that the “whirligig of time” may still “bring in his revenges,” but not very probable.

  There can be no doubt that the vessel which brought Louis Agassiz to our shores brought a scientific intelligence and scientific force which outvalued not only all the rest of the cargo, but of a thousand ordinary cargoes. In getting thorough possession of him, in making him an American citizen, and in resolutely refusing, with his hearty concurrence, to deliver him up to the country which afterward claimed his services, the United States must be considered to have made a good bargain. He was too poor when he arrived here to pay any “duties” into the Treasury; but the impulse he gave to science in this country enriched us in a degree that cannot be measured by any money standard…. It was my good fortune to meet him often during the last twenty-five years of his life; but my first impression—the impression of the comprehensiveness of his mind—was more and more confirmed as I came to know him more intimately. All the facts and principles of his special science were systematized in his vast and joyous memory, so that he was ever ready to reply to any unexpected question concerning the most obscure nooks and corners of natural history; but in replying, he ever indicated that his immense grasp of the details of his science was free from any disposition to exaggerate any detail out of its connections. No isolated fact could exist in his mind. The moment it was apprehended, it fell easily into relationship to the throng of other facts quietly stored in his broad intelligence, and became one of a group which illustrated a principle. His knowledge of particulars was extensive, minute, and accurate.

  It is the picture of a sweet, strong nature turning in its first young simplicity to noble things, and keeping its simplicity through a long life by its perpetual association with them. It is a human creature loving the earth almost as we can imagine that a beast loves it, and yet at the same time studying it like a wise man. The sea and the glacier tell him their secrets. In his very dreams the extinct fishes build again for him their lost construction.

  The title of any scientist to greatness must be determined, not so much by the multitude of new facts he has discovered as by the new laws he has established, and especially by the new methods he has inaugurated or perfected. Now, I think it can be shown that to Agassiz, more than to any other man, is due the credit of having established the laws of succession of living forms in the geological history of the earth—laws upon which must rest any true theory of evolution. Also, that to him, more than to any other man, is due the credit of having perfected the method (method of comparison) by the use of which alone biological science has advanced so rapidly in modern times…. It is evident that Agassiz laid the whole foundation of evolution, solid and broad, but refused to build any scientific structure on it; he refused to recognize the legitimate, the scientifically necessary outcome of his own work. Nevertheless without his work a scientific theory of evolution would have been impossible. Without Agassiz (or his equivalent), there would have been no Darwin. There is something to us supremely grand in this refusal of Agassiz to accept the theory of evolution. The opportunity to become the leader of modern thought, the foremost man of the century, was in his hands, and he refused, because his religious, or, perhaps better, his philosophic intuitions, forbade. To Agassiz, and, indeed, to all men of that time, to many, alas! even now, evolution is materialism. But materialism is Atheism.

  He was above all else a teacher. His work in America was that of a teacher of science,—of science in the broadest sense as the orderly arrangement of the results of all human experience. He would teach men to know, not simply to remember or to guess. He believed that men in all walks of life would be more useful and more successful through the thorough development of the powers of observation and judgment. He believed that the sense of reality should be the central axis of human life. He would have the student trained through contact with real things, not merely exercised in the recollection of the book descriptions of things. “If you study Nature in books,” he said, “when you go out of doors you cannot find her.”

  In a single chapter it is impossible to give more than a suggestion of the works of Louis Agassiz, but a study of his bibliography shows him to have been one of the most exhaustive and comprehensive thinkers in the field of science that any age has produced.

  A man of transcendent genius for scientific discovery, with intense earnestness and enthusiasm for the pursuit of truth, and rare eloquence and literary skill. If any man was devoted to the cause of truth and determined to accept it whatever it might prove to be, that man was Agassiz; for while his impulses were notably devout and reverential, he proved, on many occasions, that he was fearless and independent in the search for truth. It is no disparagement to Buckland, and Bell, and Chalmers, and the other authors of the Bridgewater Treatises to assert that Agassiz far surpassed them all in acquaintance with the methods which lead to success in the interpretation of nature, and in ability to treat the problems of natural theology from the standpoint of the zoölogist.

  Agassiz is studying not the human but the divine mind, and the result is doubly startling. We are not apt to think of mysticism and anthropomorphism together, but with Agassiz we find them inextricably mixed. It is easy to put what we may choose to call Agassiz’s real meaning into terms which his opponents would accept. But it is not easy to convince ourselves that he would have accepted any such interpretation, nor is it easy to juggle his distinct and repeated statements into any shape which shall avoid his plain acceptance of a Deity as frankly anthropomorphic as ever child addressed in prayer or painter throned on clouds.