Abstract
On a brisk November evening in 1846, Bostonians took their seats in the Tremont Temple to listen to a long-haired, large-bodied foreign professor with bright, brown, searching eyes and a charming French accent expound to them the mysteries of nature. His reputation had preceded Louis Agassiz. People were ready for a masterful performance but what they witnessed, during six successive evenings, exceeded their expectations. Louis Agassiz became an overnight sensation. His pedagogical talent honed on teaching Swiss boys in Neuchâtel, Agassiz knew how to make his lectures exciting. He spoke freely, without notes, interrupting himself only when he pulled animal specimens out of his pocket or paraded them for his audience as they were swimming in glass bowls. He flashed large paintings of animals he had commissioned to emphasize a point he was making or he would, as he kept talking, turn to a large blackboard and sketch the outline of an entire animal or some important anatomical detail. As one of his disciples recalled, he would only have to mention the “adipose fin,” a soft flap behind the dorsal fin of many salmon species, and “with the words would appear an unmistakable outline of the fish.” Agassiz was a magician, said one of his younger students, remembering how he had drawn a tiny tadpole for her, at first nothing more than a single line, which would then grow before her very eyes until the finished animal stood before her.
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Notes
- 1.
Theodore Lyman, “Recollections of Agassiz,” The Atlantic Monthly 33 (1874): 221–229; 225. Clara Conant Gilson, “Agassiz at Cambridge: A Paper of Personal Reminiscences,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 32 (1891): 741–752; 746. On Agassiz’s pedagogical skills, see James David Teller, Louis Agassiz: Scientist and Teacher (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1947).
- 2.
See Louis Agassiz, Essay on Classification, ed. Edward Lurie (1857; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) 152.
- 3.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) 3.
- 4.
Edwin Percy Whipple, Recollections of Eminent Men, with Other Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1887) 81.
- 5.
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886) 2: 405.
- 6.
References to Agassiz’s text appear as parenthetical page numbers.
- 7.
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz 2: 404.
- 8.
For more on Gray, see the still unsurpassed biography by A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin (1959; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
- 9.
Asa Gray to George Engelmann, October 8, 1846; Asa Gray to John Torrey, January 24, 1847, Letters of Asa Gray, ed. Jane Loring Gray, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893) 1: 343, 345.
- 10.
Ferris Greenslet, The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946) 210–211.
- 11.
Asa Gray to Eliza Torrey, December 14, 1842, Letters of Asa Gray 1: 259.
- 12.
Dupree, Gray 127–128.
- 13.
Harriette Knight Smith, The History of the Lowell Institute (Boston: Lamson, Wolffe, and Company, 1898) 35–36.
- 14.
Asa Gray to John Torrey, February 17, 1844, Letters of Gray 1: 316.
- 15.
Anna H. Clarke to E[Lizabeth] G. H[uidekoper], [Jan.] 22, 1846, quoted in Dupree 130.
- 16.
Asa Gray to John Torrey, January 24, 1847, Letters of Gray 1: 346.
- 17.
Gray to Jane Lathrop Loring [1847?], Letters of Gray 1: 349.
- 18.
Gray to Francis Boott, January 15, 1860, Darwin-Lyell Papers, American Philosophical Society.
- 19.
Elizabeth Agassiz, Louis Agassiz 1: 81.
- 20.
Reported in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s journal, April 7, 1848, Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
- 21.
Lane Cooper, Louis Agassiz as a Teacher: Illustrative Extracts on His Method of Instruction, with an Introductory Note (Ithaca, NY: Comstock, 1917) 66.
- 22.
Smith 40.
- 23.
Henry James Clark, A Claim for Scientific Property (Cambridge, MA: privately printed, 1863).
- 24.
“Lectures on Natural History: Professor Agassiz’s Third Lecture. From the Evening Post,” Supplement to the Connecticut Courant, January 8, 1848, 7.
- 25.
Agassiz, Twelve Lectures 7. These lectures were transcribed by “phonographer” James Stone. “Phonography” or “sound writing” was just another term for the Pittman system, which Dr. Houston, Agassiz’s previous stenographer, had also used. This method of shorthand allowed the transcriber to omit vowels if only consonants were needed to determine a word.
- 26.
Louis Agassiz, Address Delivered on the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander von Humboldt under the Auspices of the Boston Natural History Society, with an Account of the Evening Reception (Boston: Boston Natural History Society, 1869) 35–36.
- 27.
See the tribute Agassiz offered in 1863 in Methods of Study in Natural History: “Many modifications of Cuvier’s great divisions have been attempted; but though some improvements have been made in the details of his classification, all departures from its great fundamental principle are errors, and do but lead us away from the recognition of the true affinities among animals” (13).
- 28.
See Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1982) 270.
- 29.
George Coleman, George Cuvier, Zoologist: A Study in the History of Evolution Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) 68.
- 30.
Georges Cuvier, Historical Portrait of the Progress of Ichthyology, from Its Origins to Our Own Time, ed. Theodore W. Pietsch, trans. Abby J. Simpson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 281.
- 31.
Geoffroy St. Hilaire, as cited in Mayr 463.
- 32.
Agassiz, Essay 87; Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (1960; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 58–59. See also Toby Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 135–137.
- 33.
Agassiz, Twelve Lectures 27.
- 34.
The book’s author, a journalist, was not known until 1871. For more on this publication, see James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
- 35.
Darwin, Origin 490.
- 36.
Charles Darwin to J. E. Gray, December 18, 1847, Darwin Correspondence Project (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk), Letter no. 1139.
- 37.
See “Darwin’s Study of the Cirripedia,” Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/commentary/life-sciences/darwin-and-barnacles/darwin-s-study-cirripedia.
- 38.
The results of Darwin’s labors were four important monographs, two on Living Cirripedia and two on Fossil Cirripedia, published between 1851 and 1854.
- 39.
Charles Darwin to Agassiz, 22 October 1848, Agassiz Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1419 (274).
- 40.
Origin 84.
- 41.
On Gmelin, see the note for p. 53A.
- 42.
Origin 365–366.
- 43.
Origin 318.
- 44.
Charles Darwin to Louis Agassiz, November 11 [1859], Agassiz Papers, Houghton Library, MS Am 1419 (278). Agassiz’s copy of Origin is now at the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University.
- 45.
Asa Gray to J. D. Hooker, January 5, 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk), Letter 2638.
- 46.
Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy 170.
- 47.
The daguerreotypes are in the photographic collection of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; see Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
- 48.
For more on this, see chapter 5 (“A Pint of Ink”) in Irmscher, Louis Agassiz. The Southern context in which Agassiz’s views were fostered and sometimes contested is definitively explained in Lester D. Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion in the American South: John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815–1895 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
- 49.
Back paper wrapper of first edition of Agassiz, Introduction.
- 50.
Thomas H. Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature (1863; New York, 2001) 71–72.
- 51.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (1851; New York: Norton, 1967) 163.
- 52.
Agassiz to Rose Mayor Agassiz, December 2, 1846, Agassiz Papers, Houghton Library, MS Am 1419 (65). Stephen Jay Gould published the first translation of this letter; see Gould, “Flaws in a Victorian Veil: Immediate Visceral Reaction to Blacks Was What Jolted Louis Agassiz to Consider the Polygenist Theory of Human Races as Separate Species,” New Scientist (August 31, 1978): 633–632, and Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981; New York: Norton, 1993) 44–45.
- 53.
Emerson, Journal, August 31, 1866, Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1984) 541–542.
- 54.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, quoting Horace, called him a “sparse and infrequent worshipper of the Gods,” Longfellow, Journal, 11 June 1848, Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, MS Am 1340 (201); Gilson, “Agassiz at Cambridge” 746.
- 55.
Louis Agassiz, “VIII Ps. 3.4. When I consider Thy heavens …,” Louis Agassiz Papers, Houghton Library, MS Am 1410 (142). Agassiz was remembering passages from the Bible that his father would have recited, perhaps most of all Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
- 56.
See Irmscher, Agassiz 153.
- 57.
Agassiz, “America the Old Word,” Geological Sketches (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1866) 11.
- 58.
John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Prayer of Agassiz” (1874), The Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Household Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904) 552–554; see 552.
- 59.
[Asa Gray], “Louis Agassiz,” The Nation 442 (18 December 1873): 404–405.
- 60.
2 Corinthians 3:2.
- 61.
David Starr Jordan, Days of a Man: Being the Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy. Vol. 2: 1920–1921 (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1922) 173.
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Agassiz, L. (2017). Introduction. In: Irmscher, C. (eds) Introduction to the Study of Natural History. Classic Texts in the Sciences. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66081-3_1
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