Agassiz, Jean Louis Rodolphe

Agassiz, Jean Louis Rodolphe

(b. Motieren-Vuly, Switzerland, 28 May 1807; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 14 December 1873)

ichthyology, geology, paleontology.

Louis Agassiz, the son of Rodolphe and Rose Mayor Agassiz, grew to manhood enjoying the prosperity and status of his family and the natural beauty of the Swiss cantons of Fribourg, Vaud, and Neuchâtel. He never identified with a sectarian religious persuasion. He did embrace the Protestant pietism of his minister father, but was more fundamentally devoted to an idealistic romanticism that saw the power of the Creator exemplified in all flora and fauna. The Agassiz and Mayor families were anxious to see Louis succeed in the world of commerce or medicine, but he triumphed over their opposition and entered the larger world of European scholarship and cosmopolitanism by attending the universities of Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich. In 1829 he earned his doctorate in philosophy at the universities of Munich and Erlangen and published a monograph on the fishes of Brazil that brought him to the attention of Baron Georges Cuvier. In 1830 he earned the doctor of medicine degree at Munich. After studying under Cuvier’s tutelage in Paris, Agassiz accepted a professorship at the newly established College of Neuchâtel in 1832. In the same year he married Cécile Braun, the sister of his Heidelberg classmate Alexander Braun. In 1846 he accepted an invitation to lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston. On the death of his wife in 1847, he accepted a professorship at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, where he continued to teach until his death. Agassiz’s decision to make the United States his permanent home-despite attractive offers to return to Europewas influenced by his love for and marriage to Elizabeth Cabot Cary. From 1850 until 1873 she raised Agassiz’s three children by his first wife and acted as a constant companion in the writing, exploration, and interpretation of natural history.

Agassiz’s career had two distinct geographic and intellectual aspects. As a European, he published monographs on ichthyology, paleontology, and geology whose promise earned him the admiration of such established savants as Cuvier, Alexander von Humboldt, and Sir Charles Lyell. As an American, Agassiz made nature study popular and appealing, explored the American environment with great enthusiasm, and established lasting institutions of research and education. His robust attitude toward life and nature study was a perpetual passion that tolerated no opposition to plans he deemed vital. Agassiz demanded unquestioning loyalty, and repaid such dedication by deep love and devotion. His dedication to science and culture won him the admiration of statesman and commoner alike, although his reputation among fellow scientists diminished with the passing of time. His exceptionally strong constitution sustained him on journeys of exploration through central Europe, the Swiss Alps, the eastern United States and the trans-Mississippi West, and South America. In 1873, shortly after an expedition through the Strait of Magellan, Agassiz died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Among his numerous awards and honors were the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London.

Agassiz thought of himself primarily as a naturalist, generalizing about the entire range of organic creation. Nevertheless, it is the modern sciences of \ichthyology, geology, and paleontology that bear the stamp of his contributions. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when the natural sciences were in transition from classical to evolutionary biology, Agassiz’s work and career were typical. He had an insatiable desire to record data; he described and analyzed material significant for the study of marine biology, freshwater fishes. embryology, and fossil fishes. In this last realm, his Poinssons fossiles, written directly in the tradition of his mentor Cuvier, contained precise descriptions of more than 1,700 ancient species, together with illustrated reconstructions based on principles of comparative anatomy. This pioneer effort was a model of exactitude, providing future students with primary data relating zoology to geology and paleontology.

Agassiz never viewed his work in paleoichthyology as providing a framework for conceptions of natural history related to the development of lower forms into higher ones. He insisted that ancient and modern species were permanent representations of a divine idea, and bore no genetic relationship to each other. While employing techniques of close empirical study learned from such teachers as Cuvier and Ignaz Døllinger, Agassiz affirmed a view of the world above and beyond experience. In this sense, he reflected the teaching of Lorenz Oken and Friedrich Schelling. These diverse influences in Agassiz’s intellectual history make it impossible to separate his contributions to exact science from his philosophy of nature. He worked in two divergent traditions, and his efforts reflected the virtues and deficiencies of each. This is why evolutionists found Agassiz so mystifying an opponent and why the Swiss naturalist found their views to be mere restatements of ideas absorbed and partly rejected in his youth.

These divergent qualities were reflected in Agassiz’s geological investigations. From 1835 to 1845, while still serving as a professor at Neuchâtel, Agassiz studied the glacial formations of Switzerland and compared them with the geology of England and central Europe. The resulting concept of the “Ice Age” was remarkable for its breadth of generalization and for the exacting field study represented. Agassiz held that in the immediately recent past there had been an era during which large land masses over much of northern Europe were covered with ice. With the onset of warming periods, the recession of the ice was responsible for upheaval and subsidence. The marks of glaciers could be discerned in the scratched and polished rocks as well as in the configurations of the earth in glaciated regions. Glacial movement was responsible for modern geological configurations, and could be traced in such areas as Switzerland. Agassiz was not the first to observe the phenomena of glaciation, but he was innovative in the wide-ranging character of his research, his measurement of ice formations, and his elaboration of local geology into a theory explaining Continental natural history. Such events, now known to have been of greater cyclical duration than Agassiz asserted, were still sufficient to convince such naturalists as Darwin and Lyell that Pleistocene glaciation was a primary mechanism in causing the geographical distribution and consequent genetic relationship of flora and fauna otherwise inexplicably separated by land and water masses. But Agassiz could never accept such a conclusion. He interpreted glaciation in metaphysical terms. To him, the Deity had been responsible for the Ice Age, a catastrophe that provided a permanent physical barrier separating the species of the past from those of the present era. There were as many as twenty seperate creations in the history of the earth, each distinguished by animal and plant forms bearing no relationship to present types. At best, paleontology could only provide a glimpse of those “prophetic types” that suggested the course of future development, while those forms that remained unchanged over time were evidence of the wisdom of the Creator in inspiring perfect creatures from the beginning. Agassiz extended his conception of natural history to include mankind, asserting that men, like other animals, were of distinct types or species and were marked by different physical and intellectual traits. In the United States of the pre-Civil War years, such ideas provided convenient rationalizations for defenders of the slave system.

Agassiz’s visit to the United States in 1846 was a notable success, for the brilliant young naturalist described his adventures and communicated his love of nature to lecture hall audiences in Boston and other eastern cities. He had also come to compare the natural history of the Old World with that of America, but this temporary purpose soon vanished in the adulation he received from all classes of Americans. Agassiz found the natural environment fascinating, and after accepting the Harvard professorship, he determined to explore it and interpret it to his new countrymen. In 1855 he announced a grand plan for the publication of a monumental ten-volume study, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. that would depict the full scope of the American natural environment. Only four volumes appeared; and these, although magnificently illustrated, were valuable only for their descriptions of North American turtles. The work was at once too complicated for the general public and too descriptive for those naturalists increasingly interested in new theoretical conceptions identifiable with the work of Charles Darwin.

Agassiz was philosophically and scientifically unprepared to meet the challenge of the theory of evolution as it was propounded in 1859. During his early years in the United States he extended his glacial theory to North America, he explored large portions of the country, and conducted some potentially valuable research in marine biology. More than all these efforts, it was the collection of the raw data of nature that drove Agassiz ever onward, so that Harvard University became a center for natural history instruction and research. The capstone of such efforts was the establishment at Harvard College in 1859 of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, an institution made possible by private gifts and funds supplied by the state of Massachusetts. The museum always bore the impress of Agassiz’s conception of the relationship between graduate instruction, research, fieldwork, and publication, centered in an institution of higher learning and supported by private philanthropy and public funds.

It was inevitable that Agassiz became the leading American opponent of Darwin, but regrettable that his public activity left little time for reflection on the data he had collected or on alternate interpretations of its significance. Agassiz had become a public man in the fullest sense, but even had he devoted more time to intellectual labor, it is doubtful that he could have accepted an interpretation of nature that seemed to deny permanence and immaterialism. Some of his critiques of evolution were trenchant ones, but in the main his attacks were inconclusive efforts that failed to convince his scientific colleagues. Many of these appeared in popular journals, reflecting Agassiz’s conviction that this “error” had to be opposed with the full power of his public position. While Agassiz’s opposition to evolution was inconsequential, the years from 1859 to his death were nevertheless a period of notable public accomplishment. He was able to obtain more than $600,000 in public and private support for the Harvard museum, and to convince fellow scientists to establish the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. This achievement, coupled with his earlier efforts to advise the federal government on the operations of the U.S. Coast Survey and the Smithsonian Institution, revealed Agassiz in the prime of his American influence and international prestige.

By 1873, despite Darwin, Agassiz’s name was synonymous with the study of natural history. It was fitting that in that last year of his life he established the Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island, off the Massachusetts coast, as a combined summer school and marine biological station. In testimony to Agassiz’s American influence, the faculty of the school was entirely composed of his former students. The Poissans fossiles and Etudes sur les glaciers were high points of Agassiz’s career in Europe; in America, the life and work of such students as William James, David Starr Jordan, Alexander Agassiz, Frederick Ward Putnam, and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler exemplify his role and cultural significance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Bibliographies of Agassiz’s writings are in his Bibliographia zoologiae et geologiae, 4 vols. (London, 1848–1854), 1, 98–103; Jules Marcou, Life, Letters, and Works of Louis Agassiz (see below), II, 258–303: and Max Meisel, A Bibliography of American Natural History, 3 vols. (New York, 1924–1929), passim. Among his significant works are Selecia genera et species piscium guns in itinere per Brasiliam 1817–1830... (Munich, 1829); Recherches cur les poissons fossiles, 5 vols.(Neuchatel, 1833–1844); Monographies d’ichinodermes rivans et /ossi/es.. 4 vols. (Neuchatel, 1838–1842): Etudes cur les glaciers (Neuchatel, 1840): Twelve Lectures on Comparative Embryology (Boston, 1849): Lake Superior(Boston, 1850); Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, 4 vols. (Boston, 1857–1862); Essay on Classification (London, 1859), also ed., with intro.. by Edward Lurie (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Geological Sketches(Boston. 1866): “Evolution and Permanence of Type,” in Atlantic Monthhc, 33 (Jan. 1874), 94–101; and Geological Sketches. Second Series (Boston, 1876). Lake Superior (Boston, 1850); Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, 4 vols. (Boston, 1857–1862); Essay on Classification (London, 1859), also ed., with intro., by Edward Lurie (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Geological Sketches (Boston, 1866); “Evolution and Permanence of Type,” in Atlantic Monthly. 33 (Jan. 1874), 94–101; and Geological Sketches, Second Series (Boston, 1876).

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Agassiz are Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, ed., Louis Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence, 2 vols. (Boston, 1885); Lane Cooper, Louis Agassiz as a Teacher, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1945); Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960); Jules Marcou, Life, Letters, and Works of Louis Agassiz. 2 vols. (New York, 1896); and Ernst Mayr, “Agassiz, Darwin and Evolution,” in Harvard Library Bulletin. 13 (Spring 1959), 165–194.

Edward Lurie