A LIFE OF AGASSIZ.*
THE Life of Agassiz which Mr. Holder has compiled for the American series of Biographies of Leaders of Science, should be welcome to English readers ; but The We and Letters of Agassiz, published by his widow, will still remain the best, though by no means the ideal, history of his bright though laborious life. Both works suggest a certain curiosity as to the disproportion between his posthumous fame in America and this country, and though Mr. Holden does not appear to notice the fact, it certainly deserves explanation. In North America, the name of Agassiz is inseparable from all that is most popular and most progressive in the study of life and nature. His method of teaching is even now a de- lightful reminiscence, and in almost 'every town and city of the United States, and even in the islands of the Pacific, the Agassiz Society, with its two thousand clubs, keeps the birth- day of the naturalist as a festival among the fields and woods. In England, the name which in America is a household word, is scarcely known. It may be doubted whether one in ten thousand English readers is 'familiar with a single work by Agassiz, or could give a coherent account of his contribution to the sciences of which he was such an earnest exponent. The reason for this is not far to seek. Agassiz has not left a single work, if we except those on his discoveries in the glaciers of the Alps, which is within the reach of the general reader. His one text-book, The Principles of Zoology, is still in demand in the United States, but it contains no new theory or system ; and his serious contributions to scientific knowledge generally rivalled the proportions of his first book,—a history of fossil fishes in ten folio volumes, which surpassed in bulk and equalled in erudition any of the works in the library of Cal- vinistic theology, which his father had inherited from three generations of Swiss divines. It was Agassiz himself, and not his books, who made a conquest of the imagination of young America. He was Frank Buckland, Sir Richard Owen, and the laborious Swiss professor all in one, and as a teacher, and, in a sense, a proselytiser for science, his influence was boundless. There was a time when he caught the ear of an English public who were no less ready than their
* Louis Agaosiz. By C. F. Holder, LL.D. Loudon and New York : Putnam's Sons,
indomitable industry, of his making copies of books which as a boy he was unable to buy, of his starving himself in Paris in order to publish his books and pay his draughtsman, of his haunting the fish-markets at Munich on Fridays to buy rare and bony specimens. to sketch first and eat afterwards, of his encouragement by Cuvier, who gave up to him the work on fishes which he' had begun, and of Humboldt's kindness in first advising him on his work, and then asking him to dine,-8,
thoughtful piece of good-nature which Agassiz often spoke of later. Then came Agassiz's discovery of the laws of glaciers, and of the previous existence of a glacial age over temperate Europe.
In spite of the dying warning of Clavier, that "work kills," and of Humboldt's caution to avoid that encyclopasdio treat- ment of natural science which was the legacy of Button, and perhaps of Humboldt himself, Agassiz had deserted his favourite fishes, fossils, and frogs, and migrated to the glaciers of his native mountains. He lived for months upon the slipping ice-streams, whose rate of movement he deter- mined by observation from year to year. He marked the normal work of the glaciers of to-day, and saw certain signs of their universal presence in a bygone age. He catalogued the mountains which had been carved by the ice-chisels, and identified the chips on distant plains. On one glacier he built a but, propped against an immense boulder which was travelling down with the ice. He named it the Hotel Neuchittelois, and there entertained Guyot, Burokhardt, and other companions in his research. In order to ascertain its internal structure, he caused himself to be lowered into the heart of the glacier itself. The way lay down a well-hole in the ice, down which poured one of the feeders of the sub-glacial river. Into this he was lowered by his companions, at a time when the whole mass was moving at the rate of forty feet a day. As he descended between the ever-deepening blue of the ice-walls, absorbed in observation of the colours and structure of the frozen walls, he was suddenly plunged into the glacial river which flowed at the bottom. His signal was for a moment misunderstood, and he was plunged still further into the freezing stream. His ascent between the pendant javelins of ice was scarcely less dangerous. But he had penetrated to a depth of 120 feet, and finally solved the question of the structure of a glacier. His honesty and
courage won him the steady friendship of Dean Buckland, the author of the celebrated Bridgewater Treatise, whose conclusions the work of Agassiz necessarily questioned.
"Of the older naturalists," he said long afterwards at a public lecture in America, " only one stood by mo. Dr. Buckland, Dean of Westminster, who had come to Switzerland at my urgent request, for the express purpose of seeing my evidence, and who had been fully convinced of the ancient extension of the ice there, consented to accompany me in my glacier hunt in Great Britain, It is one of the delightful recollections of my life that as we approached the castle of the Duke of Argyle, standing in a valley not unlike one of the Swiss valleys, I said to Buckland, Here we shall find our first traces of glaciers ; ' and as the coach entered the valley we actually drove over an ancient terminal moraine."
The Syst6me Glacial, in which his inquiries and conclusions were embodied, is a work of extraordinary merit, original, comprehensive, constructive, and complete ; and it is, perhaps, to be regretted that Agassiz, declaring that "the broad know- ledge of all nature was given to none but Humboldt," aban- doned the search for general truths in the attempt to catalogue the infinite detail of the varied phenomena of life. His enor- mous industry rendered the task less hopeless than it might have appeared to others. But we cannot be blind to the fact that with the Systeme Glacial the career of Agassiz, as the leader of thought, closes. With it also closes his career in Europe. At the age of thirty-nine, he left Neuchatel for the United States ; and from that time begins his life as the teacher of science to the New World, the character in which his memory to-day is so justly revered.
He was fortunate in the time of his coming. He found—tc. quote his own words—a continent before him for exploration which had only been skimmed upon the surface, and a public, eager to learn, but without books and without teachers. "All the world lives well," he wrote to his mother, "is decently clad, learns something, is awake and interested I should try in vain to give you an idea of this great nation passing from childhood to maturity ; their look is wholly to the future." There was much here to tempt Agassiz. Even in Switzerland he had found amusement and relaxation in teaching children. He would draw them after him into the fields, like the Piper of Hamelin, or climb the lower spurs of a mountain, and show them the work of rivers and glaciers, or the structure of flowers gathered on the spot. He was hardly less successful with children of a larger growth. Handsome, high-spirited, and genial, with a European reputation for solid attainments, and the Swiss power of adapting himself to new surroundings, Agassiz instantly won a place in the affections of young America which he never lost. He was appointed to the Chair of Natural History at Cambridge, and from then till the date of his death, was almost worshipped by the crowds of young men and young women who flocked to the ever-growing schools of zoology and other branches of natural sciences which were founded under his influence.
Every one who has had the experience knows the charm of outdoor life in company with one who sees what they do not see, and can interest without wearying the atten- tive. Agassiz had this gift in the perfection which an acquaintance with all the forms of life of present and past epochs can ensure. His delight at finding himself for the first time on a real sea-beach on the New-England coast, with whose natural inhabitants he was perfectly familiar from books and museums, but which he had never seen in their native haunts, amused and astonished his first hosts in America. But he explained that, as regards the geology of the scene, he had nothing new to learn. He had seen it all in the ancient sea-beaches on the sides of Mount Jura. It is to the credit both of teacher and learners that the road to knowledge, as shown by Agassiz, was neither easy nor arti- ficial. We may quote the following extract from his Life and Letters, which have been taken as a text by Morelli in his work on Italian art :—" His first steps in teaching special students were discouraging, observation and comparison being, in his opinion, the intellectual tools most indispens- able to the naturalist (" And I may add," says Morelli, "to the art connoisseur also "). His first lesson was one in looking. He gave no assistance, but simply left hie student with the specimen, telling him to use his eyes diligently, and report upon what he saw. "Eyes without feeling, feeling without sense," had no part in his method; and it is largely from his insistence on this first requirement that accurate first-band observation has become the most accredited instrument of modern natural science. A minor, but impor- tant feature of his methods was the front place given to drawing and illustration as a means of learning as well as of imparting the facts of nature. Adequate illustration of natural objects begins with Agassiz. His attitude towards the modern theories of evolution has often been misrepresented. Briefly, he objected, not to the theory of evolution as part of the automatic working of natural forces, but to the notion that such a theory was an adequate and satisfactory account of the origin of the living world as we see it to-day. He looked upon it as the means used to effect the divine plan of creation. "I confess," he wrote, "that there seems to me to be a repulsive poverty in this material explanation, and that it is contradicted by the intellectual grandeurs of the uni- verse." Darwin's opinion of him may be gathered from his letter to Longfellow :—" Both our Universities cannot furnish the like to the men you have at Harvard. Why, there is Agassiz ; he counts for three."
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