Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence Part 20

Removal to Cambridge.

Literary and Scientific a.s.sociations there and in Boston.

Household in Cambridge.

Beginning of Museum.

Journey to Lake Superior.

"Report, with Narration."

"Principles of Zoology," by Aga.s.siz and Gould.

Letters from European Friends respecting these Publications.

Letter from Hugh Miller.

Second Marriage.

Arrival of his Children in America.

One of Aga.s.siz's great pleasures in the summer of 1847 consisted in excursions on board the Coast Survey steamer Bibb, then employed in the survey of the harbor and bay of Boston, under command of Captain (afterward Admiral) Charles Henry Davis. Under no more kindly auspices could Aga.s.siz's relations with this department of government work have been begun. "My cabin," writes Captain Davis, after their first trip together, "seems lonely without you."

Hitherto the sea-sh.o.r.e had been a closed book to the Swiss naturalist, and now it opened to him a field of research almost as stimulating as his own glaciers. Born and bred among the mountains, he knew marine animals only as they can be known in dried and alcoholic specimens, or in a fossil state. From the Bibb he writes to a friend on sh.o.r.e: "I learn more here in a day than in months from books or dried specimens. Captain Davis is kindness itself.

Everything I can wish for is at my disposal so far as it is possible."

Dr. Bache was at this time Superintendent of the Coast Survey, and he saw at once how the work of the naturalist might ally itself with the professional work of the Survey to the greater usefulness of both. From the beginning to the end of his American life, therefore, the hospitalities of the United States Coast Survey were open to Aga.s.siz. As a guest on board her vessels he studied the reefs of Florida and the Bahama Banks, as well as the formations of our New England sh.o.r.es. From the deck of the Bibb, in connection with Count de Pourtales, his first dredging experiments were undertaken; and his last long voyage around the continent, from Boston to San Francisco, was made on board the Ha.s.sler, a Coast Survey vessel fitted out for the Pacific sh.o.r.e. Here was another determining motive for his stay in this country. Under no other government, perhaps, could he have had opportunities so invaluable to a naturalist.

But events were now pa.s.sing in Europe which made his former position there, as well as that of many of his old friends, wholly unstable. In February, 1848, the proclamation of the French republic broke upon Europe like a clap of thunder from a clear sky.

The news created great disturbances in Switzerland, and especially in the canton of Neuchatel, where a military force was immediately organized by the republican party in opposition to the conservatives, who would fain have continued loyal to the Prussian king. For the moment all was chaos, and the prospects of inst.i.tutions of learning were seriously endangered. The republican party carried the day; the canton of Neuchatel ceased to be a dependence of the Prussian monarchy, and became merged in the general confederation of Switzerland.

At about the same time that Aga.s.siz, in consequence of this change of conditions, was honorably discharged from the service of the Prussian king, a scientific school was organized at Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, in direct connection with Harvard University. This school, known as the Lawrence Scientific School, owed its existence to the generosity of Abbott Lawrence, formerly United States Minister at the Court of St. James. He immediately offered the chair of Natural History (Zoology and Geology) to Aga.s.siz, with a salary of fifteen hundred dollars, guaranteed by Mr. Lawrence himself, until such time as the fees of the students should be worth three thousand dollars to their professor. This time never came. Aga.s.siz's lectures, with the exception of the more technical ones addressed to small cla.s.ses, were always fully attended, but special students were naturally very few in a department of pure science, and their fees never raised the salary of the professor perceptibly. This was, however, counterbalanced in some degree by the clause in his contract which allowed him entire freedom for lectures elsewhere, so that he could supplement his restricted income from other sources.

In accordance with this new position Aga.s.siz now removed his bachelor household to Cambridge, where he opened his first course in April, 1848. He could hardly have come to Harvard at a more auspicious moment, so far as his social and personal relations were concerned. The college was then on a smaller scale than now, but upon its list of professors were names which would have given distinction to any university. In letters, there were Longfellow and Lowell, and Felton, the genial Greek scholar, of whom Longfellow himself wrote, "In Attica thy birthplace should have been." In science, there were Peirce, the mathematician, and Dr.

Asa Gray, then just installed at the Botanical Garden, and Jeffries Wyman, the comparative anatomist, appointed at about the same time with Aga.s.siz himself. To these we might almost add, as influencing the scientific character of Harvard, Dr. Bache, the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, and Charles Henry Davis, the head of the Nautical Almanac, since the kindly presence of the former was constantly invoked as friend and counselor in the scientific departments, while the latter had his residence in Cambridge, and was as intimately a.s.sociated with the interests of Harvard as if he had been officially connected with the university.

A more agreeable set of men, or one more united by personal relations and intellectual aims, it would have been difficult to find. In connection with these names, those of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, and Holmes also arise most naturally, for the literary men and scholars of Cambridge and Boston were closely united; and if Emerson, in his country home at Concord, was a little more withdrawn, his influence was powerful in the intellectual life of the whole community, and acquaintance readily grew to friends.h.i.+p between him and Aga.s.siz. Such was the pleasant and cultivated circle into which Aga.s.siz was welcomed in the two cities, which became almost equally his home, and where the friends.h.i.+ps he made gradually transformed exile into household life and ties.

In Cambridge he soon took his share in giving as well as receiving hospitalities, and his Sat.u.r.day evenings were not the less attractive because of the foreign character and somewhat unwonted combination of the household. Over its domestic comforts now presided an old Swiss clergyman, Monsieur Christinat. He had been attached to Aga.s.siz from childhood, had taken the deepest interest in his whole career, and, as we have seen, had a.s.sisted him to complete his earlier studies. Now, under the disturbed condition of things at home, he had thrown in his lot with him in America. "If your old friend," he writes, "can live with his son Louis, it will be the height of his happiness." To Aga.s.siz his presence in the house was a benediction. He looked after the expenses, and acted as commissary in chief to the colony. Obliged, as Aga.s.siz was, frequently to be absent on lecturing tours, he could, with perfect security, intrust the charge of everything connected with the household to his old friend, from whom he was always sure of an affectionate welcome on his return. In short, so far as an old man could, "papa Christinat," as he was universally called in this miscellaneous family, strove to make good to him the absence of wife and children.

The make-up of the settlement was somewhat anomalous. The house, though not large, was sufficiently roomy, and soon after Aga.s.siz was established there he had the pleasure of receiving under his roof certain friends and former colleagues, driven from their moorings in Europe by the same disturbances which had prevented him from returning there. The arrival among them of Mr. Guyot, with whom his personal and scientific intimacy was of such long standing, was a great happiness. It was especially a blessing at this time, for troubles at home weighed upon Aga.s.siz and depressed him. His wife, always delicate in health, had died, and although his children were most affectionately provided for in her family and his own, they were separated from each other, as well as from him; nor did he think it wise to bring them while so young, to America. The presence, therefore, of one who was almost like a brother in sympathy and companions.h.i.+p, was now more than welcome.

His original staff of co-workers and a.s.sistants still continued with him, and there were frequent guests besides, chiefly foreigners, who, on arriving in a new country, found their first anchorage and point of departure in this little European settlement.

The house stood in a small plot of ground, the cultivation of which was the delight of papa Christinat. It soon became a miniature zoological garden, where all sorts of experiments in breeding and observations on the habits of animals, were carried on. A tank for turtles and a small alligator in one corner, a large hutch for rabbits in another, a cage for eagles against the wall, a tame bear and a family of opossums, made up the menagerie, varied from time to time by new arrivals.

But Aga.s.siz could not be long in any place without beginning to form a museum. When he accepted the chair offered him at Cambridge, there were neither collections nor laboratories belonging to his department. The specimens indispensable to his lectures were gathered almost by the day, and his outfit, with the exception of the ill.u.s.trations he had brought from Europe, consisted of a blackboard and a lecture-room. There was no money for the necessary objects, and the want of it had to be supplied by the professor's own industry and resources. On the banks of the Charles River, just where it is crossed by Brighton Bridge, was an old wooden shanty set on piles; it might have served perhaps, at some time, as a bathing or a boat house. The use of this was allowed Aga.s.siz for the storing of such collections as he had brought together. Pine shelves nailed against the walls served for cases, and with a table or two for dissection this rough shelter was made to do duty as a kind of laboratory. The fact is worth noting, for here was the beginning of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, now admitted to a place among the great inst.i.tutions of its kind in the world.

In the summer of 1848 Aga.s.siz organized an expedition entirely after his own heart, inasmuch as it combined education with observation in the field. The younger portion of the party consisted of several of his special pupils, and a few other Harvard students who joined the expedition from general interest. Beside these, there were several volunteer members, who were either naturalists or had been attracted to the undertaking by their love of nature and travel. Their object was the examination of the eastern and northern sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior from Sault Ste. Marie to Fort William, a region then little known to science or to tourists. Aga.s.siz taught along the road. At evening, around the camp-fire, or when delayed by weather or untoward circ.u.mstances, he would give to his companions short and informal lectures, it might be on the forest about them, or on the erratic phenomena in the immediate neighborhood,--on the terraces of the lake sh.o.r.e, or on the fish of its waters. His lecture-room, in short, was everywhere; his apparatus a traveling blackboard and a bit of chalk; while his ill.u.s.trations and specimens lay all around him, wherever the party chanced to be.

To Aga.s.siz himself the expedition was of the deepest interest.

Glacial phenomena had, as we have seen, met him at every turn since his arrival in the United States, but nowhere had he found them in greater distinctness than on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior. As the evidence acc.u.mulated about him, he became more than ever satisfied that the power which had modeled and grooved the rocks all over the country, and clothed it with a sheet of loose material reaching to the sea, must have been the same which had left like traces in Europe. In a continent of wide plains and unbroken surfaces, and, therefore, with few centres of glacial action, the phenomena were more widely and uniformly scattered than in Europe. But their special details, down to the closest minutiae, were the same, while their definite circ.u.mscription and evenness of distribution forbade the idea of currents or floods as the moving cause. Here, as elsewhere, Aga.s.siz recognized at once the comprehensive scope of the phenomena. The whole history reconstructed itself in his mind, to the time when a sheet of ice clothed the land, reaching the Atlantic sea-board, as it now does the coast of Spitzbergen and the Arctic sh.o.r.es.

He made also a careful survey of the local geology of Lake Superior, and especially of the system of d.y.k.es, by the action of which he found that its bed had been excavated, and the outline of its sh.o.r.es determined. But perhaps the inhabitants of the lake itself occupied him even more than its conformation or its surrounding features. Not only for its own novelty and variety, but for its bearing on the geographical distribution of animals, the fauna of this great sheet of fresh water interested him deeply. On this journey he saw at Niagara for the first time a living gar-pike, the only representative among modern fishes of the fossil type of Lepidosteus. From this type he had learned more perhaps than from any other, of the relations between the past and the present fishes. When a student of nineteen years of age, his first sight of a stuffed skin of a gar-pike in the Museum of Carlsruhe told him that it stood alone among living fishes. Its true alliance with the Lepidosteus of the early geological ages became clear to him only later in his study of the fossil fishes. He then detected the reptilian character of the type, and saw that from the articulation of the vertebrae the head must have moved more freely on the trunk than that of any fish of our days. To his great delight, when the first living specimen of the gar-pike, or modern Lepidosteus, was brought to him, it moved its head to the right and left and upward, as a Saurian does and as no other fish can.

The result of this expedition was a valuable collection of fishes and a report upon the fauna and the geology of Lake Superior, comprising the erratic phenomena. A narrative written by James Elliot Cabot formed the introduction to the report, and it was also accompanied by two or three shorter contributions on special subjects from other members of the party. The volume was ill.u.s.trated by a number of plates exquisitely drawn and colored on stone by A. Sonrel.

This was not Aga.s.siz's first publication in America. His "Principles of Zoology" (Aga.s.siz and Gould) was published in 1848.

The book had a large sale, especially for schools. Edition followed edition, but the sale of the first part was checked by the want of the second, which was never printed. Aga.s.siz was always swept along so rapidly by the current of his own activity that he was sometimes forced to leave behind him unfinished work. Before the time came for the completion of the second part of the zoology, his own knowledge had matured so much, that to be true to the facts, he must have remodeled the whole of the first part, and for this he never found the time. Apropos of these publications the following letters are in place.

FROM SIR RODERICK MURCHISON.

BELGRAVE SQUARE, October 3, 1849.

. . .I thank you very sincerely for your most captivating general work on the "Principles of Zoology." I am quite in love with it. I was glad to find that you had arranged the nummulites with the tertiary rocks, so that the broad generalization I attempted in my last work on the Alps, Apennines, and Carpathians is completely sustained zoologically, and you will not be sorry to see the stratigraphical truth vindicated (versus E. de Beaumont and--). I beseech you to look at my memoir, and especially at my reasoning about the miocene and pliocene divisions of the Alps and Italy. It seems to me manifest that the percentage system derived from marine life can never be applied to tertiary TERRESTRIAL successions. . .

My friends have congratulated me much on this my last effort, and as Lyell and others most interested in opposing me have been forward in approval, I begin to hope that I am not yet quite done up; and that unlike the Bishop of Oviedo, my last sermon "ne sent pas de l'apoplexie." I have, nevertheless, been desperately out of sorts and full of gout and liver and all kinds of irritation this summer, which is the first for many a long year in which I have been unable to take the field. The meeting at Birmingham, however, revived me. Professor W. Rogers will have told you all about our doings. Buckland is up to his neck in "sewage," and wishes to change all underground London into a fossil cloaca of pseudo coprolites. This does not quite suit the chemists charged with sanitary responsibilities; for they fear the Dean will poison half the population in preparing his choice manures! But in this as in everything he undertakes there is a grand sweeping view.

When are we to meet again? And when are we to have a "stand-up fight" on the erratics of the Alps? You will see by the abstract of my memoir appended to my Alpine affair that I have taken the field against the extension of the Jura! In a word, I do not believe that great trunk glaciers ever filled the valleys of the Rhone, etc.

Perhaps you will be present at our next meeting of the British a.s.sociation at Edinburgh, August, 1850. Olim meminisse juvabit! and then, my dear and valued and most enlightened friend, we may study once more together the surface of my native rocks for "auld lang syne.". . .

FROM CHARLES DARWIN.

DOWN, FARNBOROUGH, KENT, June 15 [1850, probably].

MY DEAR SIR,

I have seldom been more deeply gratified than by receiving your most kind present of "Lake Superior." I had heard of it, and had much wished to read it, but I confess it was the very great honor of having in my possession a work with your autograph, as a presentation copy, that has given me such lively and sincere pleasure. I cordially thank you for it. I have begun to read it with uncommon interest, which I see will increase as I go on.

The Cirripedia, which you and Dr. Gould were so good as to send me, have proved of great service to me. The sessile species from Ma.s.sachusetts consist of five species. . .Of the genus Bala.n.u.s, on the sh.o.r.es of Britain, we have ONE species (B. perforata Bruguiere), which you have not in the United States, in the same way as you exclusively have B. eburneus. All the above species attain a somewhat larger average size on the sh.o.r.es of the United States than on those of Britain, but the specimens from the glacial beds of Uddevalla, Scotland, and Canada, are larger even than those of the United States.

Once again allow me to thank you with cordiality for the pleasure you have given me.

Believe me, with the highest respect, your truly obliged,

C. DARWIN.

The following letter from Hugh Miller concerning Aga.s.siz's intention of introducing "The Footprints of the Creator" to the American public by a slight memoir of Miller is of interest here.

It is to be regretted that with this exception no letters have been found from him among Aga.s.siz's papers, though he must have been in frequent correspondence with him, and they had, beside their scientific sympathy, a very cordial personal relation.

EDINBURGH, 2 STUART STREET, May 25, 1850.

DEAR SIR,

I was out of town when your kind letter reached here, and found such an acc.u.mulation of employment on my return that it is only now I find myself able to devote half an hour to the work of reply, and to say how thoroughly sensible I am of the honor you propose doing me. It never once crossed my mind when, in writing my little volume, the "Footprints," I had such frequent occasion to refer to my master, our great authority in ichthyic history, that he himself would have a.s.sociated his name with it on the other side of the Atlantic, and referred in turn to its humble writer.

In the accompanying parcel I send you two of my volumes, which you may not yet have seen, and in which you may find some materials for your proposed introductory memoir. At all events they may furnish you with amus.e.m.e.nt in a leisure hour. The bulkier of the two, "Scenes and Legends," of which a new edition has just appeared, and of which the first edition was published, after lying several years beside me, in 1835, is the earliest of my works to which I attached my name. It forms a sort of traditionary history of a district of Scotland, about two hundred miles distant from the capital, in which the character of the people has been scarce at all affected by the cosmopolitanism which has been gradually modifying and altering it in the larger towns; and as it has been frequently remarked,--I know not with what degree of truth,--that there is a closer resemblance between the Scotch and Swiss than between any other two peoples of Europe, you may have some interest in determining whether the features of your own country-folk are not sometimes to be seen in those of mine, as exhibited in my legendary history. Certainly both countries had for many ages nearly the same sort of work to do; both had to maintain a long and ultimately successful war of independence against nations greatly more powerful than themselves; and as their hills produced little else than the "soldier and his sword," both had to make a trade abroad of that art of war which they were compelled in self-defense to acquire at home. Even in the laws of some nations we find them curiously enough a.s.sociated together. In France, under the old regime, the personal property of all strangers dying in the country, SWISS AND SCOTS EXCEPTED, was forfeited to the king.

The other volume, "First Impressions of England and its People,"

contains some personal anecdotes and some geology. But the necessary materials you will chiefly find in the article from the "North British Review" which I also inclose. It is from the pen of Sir David Brewster, with whom for the last ten years I have spent a few very agreeable days every year at Christmas, under the roof of a common friend,--one of the landed proprietors of Fifes.h.i.+re. Sir David's estimate of the writer is, I fear, greatly too high, but his statement of facts regarding him is correct; and I think you will find it quite full enough for the purposes of a brief memoir.

With his article I send you one of my own, written about six years ago for the same periodical, as the subject is one in which, from its connection with your master study,--the natural history of fishes,--you may take more interest than most men. It embodies, from observation, what may be regarded as THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FISHERMAN, and describes some curious scenes and appearances which I witnessed many years ago when engaged, during a truant boyhood, in prosecuting the herring fishery as an amateur. Many of my observations of natural phenomena date from this idle, and yet not wholly wasted, period of my life.

With the volumes I send also a few casts of my less fragile specimens of Asterolepis. Two of the number, those of the external and internal surfaces of the creature's cranial buckler, are really very curious combinations of plates, and when viewed in a slant light have a decidedly sculpturesque and not ungraceful effect. I have seen on our rustic tombstones worse representations of angels, winged and robed, than that formed by the central plates of the interior surface when the light is made to fall along their higher protuberances, leaving the hollows in the shade. You see how truly your prediction regarding the flatness of the creature's head is substantiated by these casts; it is really not easy to know how, placed on so flat a surface, the eyes could have been very available save for star-gazing; but as nature makes no mistakes in such matters, it is possible that the creature, like the flatfishes, may have lived much at the bottom, and that most of the seeing it had use for may have been seeing in an upward direction.

None of my other specimens of bucklers are so entire and in so good a state of keeping as the two from which I have taken the casts, but they are greatly larger. One specimen, nearly complete, exhibits an area about four times as great as the largest of these two, and I have fragments of others which must have belonged to fish still more gigantic. The two other casts are of specimens of gill covers, which in the Asterolepis, as in the sturgeon, consisted each of a single plate. In both the exterior surface of the buckler and of the operculum the tubercles are a good deal enveloped in the stone, which is of a consistency too hard to be removed without injuring what it overlies; but you will find them in the smaller cast which accompanies the others, and which, as shown by the thickness of the plate in the original, indicates their size and form in a large individual, very characteristically shown. So coral-like is their aspect, that if it was from such a cast, not a fossil (which would, of course, exhibit the peculiarities of the bone), that Lamarck founded his genus Monticularia, I think his apology for the error might almost be maintained as good. I am sorry I cannot venture on taking casts from some of my other specimens; but they are exceedingly fragile, and as they are still without duplicates I am afraid to hazard them. Since publis.h.i.+ng my little volume I have got several new plates of Asterolepis,--a broad palatal plate, covered with tubercles, considerably larger than those of the creature's external surface,--a key-stone shaped plate, placed, when in situ, in advance of the little plate between the eyes, which form the head and face of the effigy in the centre of the buckler,--and a side-plate, into which the condyloid processes of the lower jaw were articulated, and which exhibited the processes on which these hinged. There are besides some two or three plates more, whose places I have still to find. The small cast, stained yellow, is taken from an instructive specimen of the jaws of coccosteus, and exhibits a peculiarity which I had long suspected and referred to in the first edition of my volume on the Old Red Sandstone in rather incautious language, but which a set of my specimens now fully establishes. Each of the under jaws of the fish was furnished with two groups of teeth: one group in the place where, in quadrupeds, we usually find the molars; and another group in the line of the symphyses. And how these both could have acted is a problem which our anatomists here--many of whom have carefully examined my specimen--seem unable, and in some degree, indeed, afraid to solve.

I have written to the Messrs. Gould, Kendall & Lincoln to say that the third edition of the "Footprints" differs from the first and second only by the addition of a single note and an ill.u.s.trative diagram, both of which I have inclosed to them in my communication.

I antic.i.p.ate much pleasure from the perusal of your work on Lake Superior, when it comes to hand, which, as your publishers have intrusted it to the care of a gentleman visiting this country, will, I think, be soon. It is not often that a region so remote and so little known as that which surrounds the great lake of America is visited by a naturalist of the first cla.s.s. From such a terra incognita, at length unveiled to eyes so discerning, I antic.i.p.ate strange tidings.

I am, my dear sir, with respect and admiration, very truly yours,