MEN OF SCIENCE
In England, in the fall of 1870, I missed an opportunity to see the great scientific men of the time. Faraday was still active, and in the full ripeness of his fame. Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Joseph Hooker, Joule, Lyell, Murchison were in the midst of their best work, and probably all or most of them were present at the meeting of the British Association, which took place that year somewhere in the west of England. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, with whom I had for some time maintained a correspondence, growing out of the interest I felt in her Intuitive Morals, and other writings, invited me to accompany her to the meeting, at which, introduced by her, I might have had interesting interviews. I let the chance go by, and feel to-day that my memory stands impoverished in that it holds no first-hand knowledge of the lights, who in their century were the glory of their country and the world.
In Germany I was more fortunate. Arriving at Heidelberg at a time before its high prestige had suffered much diminution, I found in all the four Faculties men of great distinction. One hears that in the stern centralising to which since 1870 Germany has been subjected the outer universities have suffered, their strength, their able teachers, namely, being drawn away for a brilliant concentration at Berlin. In the little university town of those days students and professors rubbed closely and great men were sometimes found in odd environments. Expressing once a desire to see a certain venerable theologian of wide fame, I was told he was sure to be found on such and such evenings in a well-known bier locale, and there I had opportunity to observe him, an aged and withered figure, with a proper stein of the amber fluid frothing at his side, and a halo from an active pipe enwreathing his grey hair, as he joked and gossiped familiarly with his fellow-loiterers about the heavy oak table. At another time I was among surroundings less rough, the guest-room of a club of the finer world, curtained and carpeted, and made attractive with pictures, flowers, and music. A company of ladies and gentlemen sat sipping Maiwein and Mark gräfler, while a conjurer entertained them with his tricks. During one of these, desiring a confederate from the lookers-on, he approached a slender and refined-looking man, who was following the necromancer's proceedings with as much interest as anybody. The wizard's air of deference, and the respectful looks of the company led me to infer that he was a man above the common, but he took part affably in what was going on, helped out the trick, and laughed and wondered with the rest when it succeeded. I presently learned to my surprise and amusement that the amiable confederate of the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant. Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world became aware of a discovery of vast moment. The light of the sun, and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be analysed or spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning there in the immensely distant spaces. We can know what constitutes a star as unerringly as we know the constituents of the earth. Still more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division. In fact here was a method of chemical and physical analysis, much more powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe deepened and widened wondrously. I sat often among the crowd of students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand, the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the apparatus with which the magician solved the universe. Once, as I stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances. In the depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye. But it is interesting to think that for a moment once I held the attention of so potent a Prospero.
In those days the name of Kirchoff was coupled always with that of an associate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of spectrum-analysis; and in my time at Heidelberg, Bunsen was at hand and I became as familiar with his figure as with Kirchoff. In frame Bunsen was of the burly burgomaster type not rare among the Teutons, and as I saw him in his laboratory to which I sometimes gained access through students of his, he moved about in some kind of informal schlafrock or working dress of ample dimensions, with his large head crowned by a peculiar cap. On the tables within the spaces flickered numerously the "Bunsen burners," his invention, and it was easy to fancy as one saw him, surrounded by the large company of reverent disciples, that you were in the presence of the hierophant of some abstruse and mysterious cult, in whose honour waved the many lambent flames. I think he was unmarried, without domestic ties, and lived almost night and day among his crucibles and retorts, devoted to his science and pupils toward whom he showed a regard almost fatherly. In his lecture-room, in more formal dress he was less picturesque, but still a man to arouse deep interest. He was in the front rank of the chemists of all time, and I suppose had equal merit with Kirchoff in the momentous discovery in which their names are linked.
There was, however, at this time in Heidelberg a scientist probably of greater prestige than even these, whose contemporary influence was more dominant, and whose repute is now, and likely to be hereafter more prevailing. In my walks in a certain quiet street, I sometimes met a man who made an unusual impression of dignity and power. He had the bearing of a leader of men in whatever sphere he might move, massive and well-statured, his dress not obtrusive but carefully appointed, with an eye and face to command. His manner was courteous, not domineering, and I wondered who the able, high-bred gentleman might be, for he carried all that in his air as he passed along the street. It was the illustrious Helmholtz, then in his best years, with great achievements behind him and before. His researches in many fields were profound and far extending. I suppose his genius was at its best when dealing with the pervasive imponderable ether that extends out from the earth into the vast planetary spaces in whose vibrations are conditioned the phenomena of light. No subject of investigation can be more elusive. The mind that could grapple with this and arrive at the secrets and laws of the subtle medium through which the human eye receives impression is indeed worthy of our veneration. Probably, excepting Humboldt, no German scientist in these later centuries has reached such eminence. The fields of the two men were widely different. The one we know best as the scientific traveller, roaming the earth over, and reducing to ordered knowledge what can be perceived of its fauna and flora, of the strata that underlie it, the oceans that toss upon it, the atmosphere that surrounds it. The other roved not widely, but keeping to his lenses and calculations, penetrated perhaps more profoundly. Helmholtz, a well-born youth, began his career as a surgeon in the Prussian army, and his service there, no doubt, contributed to the manly carriage for which he was conspicuous. He married a lady of a noble house of Wuertemberg, and moved in an environment conducive to courtly manners. Heidelberg, like the German universities in general well understood that ability in its teachers, and not a pompous architectural display, makes a great institution. Its buildings were scattered and unpretending. Helmholtz had a lecture-room and laboratory apart, in a structure modern and graceful, but modest in its appeal. Here he discoursed to reverent throngs in tones never loud or confident. It is for wiseacres and charlatans to declaim and domineer. The masters are deferential in the presence of the sublimities and of the intelligences they are striving to enlighten.
In Germany I saw the great lights of science from afar, coming into relations of intimacy only with one or two privat-docents, young men struggling precariously for a foothold. One such striver I came to know well, a young man gifted but physically crippled, who, being anxious to get up his English, as I was to get up my German, entered with me into an arrangement to converse in these alternately. We were about on a par in our knowledge or ignorance of the speech not native to us, and helped each other merrily out of the pitfalls into which we stumbled, according as English or German ruled the time.
I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German acquaintances that while a married man, I had deserted and cast off my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn. A treacherous inseparable prefix had imparted to my "leaving them" an unlooked-for emphasis. The laugh for the moment was on me, but only for the moment. A little later Knopff was telling me of the old manuscripts in the library illuminated gorgeously by "de pious and skilful monkeys of de Middle Ages." He was a bright fellow, and I have hoped I might encounter his name in some honourable connection. If he survived it was as one of the unbekannt, an affix very dreadful to young aspirants for university honours.
As regards the men who, during the past seventy-five years have so greatly widened our scientific knowledge, I have had contact with those of Germany only for brief periods, and in the outer circle. As to their American brethren, fate has been more kind to me. I have sat as a pupil at the feet of the most eminent, and with some I have stood in the bond of friendship.
Divinity Hall, at Harvard University, has always had a pleasant seclusion. Near the end of its long, well-shaded avenue, it had in the rear the fine trees of Norton's Woods, and fifty years ago pleasant fields stretching before. Of late the Ampelopsis has taken it into its especial cherishing, draping it with a close green luxuriance that can scarcely be matched elsewhere. Moreover it is dominated by the lordly pile of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy. "Whence and what art thou, execrable shape!" a theologue once exclaimed as the walls were rising, feeling that there must always be a battle between what the old Hall stood for and the new building was to foster. But the structures have gone on in harmony, and many a devotee of science has had hospitable welcome in the quarters intended for the recruits of what so many suppose to be the opposing camp. There was a notable case of this kind in my own time.
One pleasant afternoon a group of "divinities" (Ye gods, that that should have been our title in the nomenclature of the University!) were chatting under one of the western porches. Talk turned upon an instructor, whose hand upon our essays was felt to be soft rather than critical, and who was, therefore, set low. "By Holy Scripture," broke out one, "a soft hand is a good thing. A soft hand, sir, turneth away wrath." The window close by opened into the room of Simon Newcomb, a youth who had no part in our studies, but of whom we made a chum. In those days he could laugh at such a joke as it blew in at his window with the thistle-down,—indeed was capable of such things himself.
It is a bit odd that as I come to write of him, this small witticism of half a century back should thrust itself obstinately into my memory, but after all it may not be out of place. The impression of the greatness of a mountain we get powerfully if the eye can measure it from the waif of seaweed at low tide up to the snow-cap of the summit. At this and similar jokes the boy Simon Newcomb connived, as he moved in our crowd. They were the waifs at low tide from which his towering mind rose to the measuring of the courses of the stars. He came among us as a student of the Lawrence scientific school, muscular and heavy-shouldered from work on shore and at the oar in Nova Scotia. Though not slovenly, he was the reverse of trim. His rather outlandish clothes, pressed once for all when they left the shop of the provincial tailor, held his sturdy elbows and knees in bags moulded accurately to the capacious joints. His hair hung rebelliously, and his nascent beard showed an untrained hand at the razor. But his brow was broad, his eye clear and intelligent, and he was a man to be reckoned with. He was barely of age, but already a computer in the Nautical Almanac office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity. His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular he looked toward offspring who should possess high scientific gifts. With this mind he set out on his courting, and steering clear of vain entanglements with rather preternatural coolness, at last in a remote village, satisfied himself that he had found his complement. He permitted his docile heart to fall in love, and in due course there was born into the world a great man. The wooing has a humorous aspect,—this steering of unruly Hymen! The calculated result, however, did not fail of appearance, and perhaps the world might profit from such an example. I was strongly drawn toward Simon Newcomb by his unlikeness to myself. I was town-bred and he full of strength gained in the fields and along the beach. My own disinclination for mathematics was marked, but I had a vast admiration for a man to whom its processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work:
To this work I was especially attracted, because its preparation seemed to me to embody the highest intellectual power to which man has ever attained. The matter used to present itself to my mind somewhat in this way…. There are tens of thousands of men who could be successful in all the ordinary walks of life. Thousands who could gain wealth, hundreds who could wield empires, for one who could take up the astronomical problems with any hope of success. The men who have done it are therefore in intellect the select few of the human race, an aristocracy ranking above all others in the scale of being. The astronomical ephemeris is the last practical outcome of their productive genius.
In pursuing their lives men no doubt follow the line of least resistance, and Simon Newcomb here we may be sure was no exception; thus he chose to deal in his work with the heaviest and most perplexing problems with which the human intellect can engage. I do not attempt to describe or estimate what he achieved. Only a few select minds in his generation were capable of that. At his death the tributes of those who had a right to speak were unmeasured. Perhaps no human mind ever attacked more boldly the uttermost difficulties, and indeed have been more successful in the wrestle. He was set by the side of Hipparchus, of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton. In a class thus lofty, his scientific fellows have judged that he had a title to stand. In their high strivings he was equally zealous, and his achievement was comparable with theirs. Nevertheless, had his disposition inclined him, there were many other paths into which he might have struck with success. His versatility was marked and he did try his hand at various tasks, at finance, political economy, belles-lettres. James Bryce, who knew him well, is said to have seen in him the stuff for a great man-of-affairs, a leader of armies or a captain of industry. His excursions, however, into such fields, though sometimes noteworthy in result, were transient and more or less half-hearted. His allegiance, given so early to the sublimest of pursuits, held him to the end. The Government of the United States placed him in its highest scientific position, at the head of the Naval Observatory, and his serious work from first to last was in the solemn labyrinths where the stars cross and re-cross, and here he was one of the most masterful of master-minds.
It was full fifty years since Simon Newcomb and I were boys together in Divinity Hall. No letter or message had ever passed between us. I had followed the course of his fame, and felt happy that I had once known him. Returning to my lodgings, during a sojourn in Washington, I was told I had had a visitor, a man well on in years, plain in attire, and rugged-faced. The card he left bore the name "Simon Newcomb." I sought him out at once, and have rarely felt more honoured than that my old friend, learning casually of my whereabouts, had felt the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse. After a half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man. The big brow remained and the keen and thoughtful eye. His dress and manner were simple, as of old. He was entitled to wear the insignia of a rear-admiral, and had long lived in refined surroundings which might have made him fastidious. In look and bearing, however, he was the hearty, friendly man of the Nova Scotia coast, careless of frills and fine manners.
It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who formed its membership. He moved among them as unostentatious and simple-mannered as he had been as a boy, with a catholic interest in all the varying topics which held the sympathies of the crowd, and able well to hold his own whatever might be the field of the conversation. Bishop, poet, scientist, historian, he had common ground with them all. I sat with him in his study, among heaped-up papers inscribed with the most abstruse and intricate calculations. It did not affect the warmth of his welcome that I had no partnership with him in these difficult pursuits. He was broad enough to take cognizance, too, of the things I cared for. It was hard to feel that the man there hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting, he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent, but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them and found them sympathetic. In the power of pure intellect I felt I had never known a greater man.
On an autumn day in the early fifties, as I loitered in the green-house of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe bare-headed man, in rough brown attire, came quickly stepping in from the flower-beds outside. He was in his fullest vigour, his hair more inclined to stand erect than to lie smooth, his dark eyes full of animation. It was a noticeably vivid and alert personality, and as he tossed on to a working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed plants, wet from a recent shower and bent over them in sharp scrutiny, I knew I was in the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American botanists. He had come as a boy from a remote rural district, and with few advantages, following the bent of a marked scientific genius, he had won for himself before reaching middle life a leading place. I was soon to know him better, for it was my fortunate lot to be one in the crowd of juniors which for a term lined up before him once a week or so in Holden Chapel. The small peculiarities of great men have an interest, and the function I am seeking now to fulfil is to make sharp the ordinary presentment of the eminent characters I touch. I recall of Asa Gray, that with the class, he sat at his desk behind a substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row, his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the teacher's head to a sky-light in the roof. Gray's utterance was rather hesitant. He would catch for his word often, reiterating meanwhile the article, "the-a, the-a, the-a," his gaze meanwhile fixed upon the sky-light, and a nervously gyrating forefinger raised high and brightly illuminated. The thought suggested was that he had a prompter on the roof to whom he was distressfully appealing to supply the true phrase. For Professor Gray the truth was in the top rather than the bottom of the well. Though sometimes long in coming it was the right thing when it came and clothed his thought properly. Sizing up the new professor, in our first days with him, as boys will do, some unconscionable dogs in our front row, assuming an attitude which Abraham Lincoln afterward made classic, settled back in their chairs and rested their feet on the rail in front in a position higher than their heads. The professor, withdrawing his gaze suddenly from the sky-light, found himself confronted not by expectant faces but by a row of battered and muddy boot-soles. His face fell; his whirling forefinger, ceasing to gyrate, tilted like a lance in rest at the obnoxious cowhide parapet. "Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those boots"; he ejaculated forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous clatter. Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite among our lazy men, of whom there were too many. In calling us up he began with the A's, following down the class in alphabetic regularity. While Brooks was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page following. In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so on down the class. Rumour went that our childlike professor declared he had never known anything like it. Nearly every man got the perfect mark. This was a fiction. The professor's idea was that we were old enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish negligence and tricks. If some men saw no use in botany, he would not waste time in beating it into them. He left the blind and the sluggards in their wilful ignorance, but had generously helpful hands for all wiser ones who saw the value of trimming their lamps. All such he would take to his garden personally to direct and inspire, and our better men felt all through their lives how much that meant. In general we soon came to feel and appreciate a most kindly influence as proceeding from him. I think we had no teacher whom we at the last regarded more affectionately or approached more closely; and many an indolent one was won to warm interest and diligence.
Those were the days when the older science was rocking to its foundations in a re-shaping at the hands of new and brilliant men. Faraday, we might have heard of, but Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the rest, were names all unknown, as were also the revolutionary ideas, the conservation and correlation of forces, the substitution of evolution in the scheme of the universe for the plan of special creations. Here all unconsciously we were in contact with a man who was in the thick of the new scientific movement, the friend and partner in their strivings of the daring new interpreters of the ways of God to men, and who was to have recognition as a specially effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself suddenly caught and wonderfully stimulated.
What [said Asa Gray] is the bright flame and vivid heat that is set free on your hearth when you kindle your piles of wood? It is the sunlight and sun-heat of a century ago. The beams were caught in the wilderness by the leaves of the trees; they were absorbed and stored in the trunks, and the light and heat day by day through many years was thus heaped up. When now combustion begins, it is simply a setting free of the radiance that was shed upon the forest many years ago. The noons of a time long past are making you comfortable in the wintry storm of the present. So when the anthracite glows in your grate, you feel the veritable sunbeams that were emitted aeons upon aeons ago upon the primeval world. It is the very light that was drunk in by those most ancient forests. It was held fast in the trunks, and when those faithful reservoirs in their turn were crushed and commingled and drenched until at last they lay under the earth as the coal beds, they nevertheless held fast this treasure. When you scratch your match you but unlock the hoard, and the sunlight of primeval days, diminished by no particle, glows and warms once more.
This in substance was Asa Gray's introduction from which he went on to explain that in the progress of the universe no faintest throb of energy is lost. It might pass from form to form; heat might appear as a mode of motion, of weight, of elasticity, but no smallest unit perished. So the lecture flowed on into a luminous and comprehensive exposition of the great doctrine of the conservation and correlation of force. It was Asa Gray who brought us into touch with this new science just then announcing itself to the world. He was a co-worker and a compeer of the pioneers who at that moment were breaking a way for it, and it was our privilege to sit at the feet of a master.
In later years his fame spread wide. He was recognised as the leader in America in his special field, and in a class with the best men of foreign lands. He was long a correspondent and special friend of Darwin, to the spread of whose doctrines he rendered great service. The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage with the odium theologicum. The new science, it must be said, perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing. Are Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently the workings of the "roaring-gloom that weaves for God the garment we see him by"? But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way Evolution and not Special Creations is the scheme of the world. Toward this acceptance Asa Gray helped powerfully, a champion always bold, humane, broad-minded. We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel. In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting from the clear upper sky.
A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Agassiz. He had come a few years before from Europe, a man in his prime, of great fame. He was strikingly handsome, with a dome-like head under flowing black locks, large dark, mobile eyes set in features strong and comely, and with a well-proportioned stalwart frame. At the moment his prestige was greater, perhaps, than that of any other Harvard professor. His knowledge seemed almost boundless. His glacial theory had put him among the geological chiefs, and as to animated nature he had ordered and systematised, from the lowest plant-forms up to the crown of creation, the human being. Abroad we knew he was held to be an adept in the most difficult fields and now in his new environment he was pushing his investigations with passionate zeal. But the boys found in him points on which a laugh could be hung. As he strode homeward from his walks in the outer fields or marshes, we eyed him gingerly, for who could tell what he might have in his pockets? Turtles, tadpoles, snakes, any old monster might be there, and queer stories prevailed of the menagerie which, hung up, and forgotten in the professor's dressing-room, crept out and sought asylum in the beds, shoes, and hats of the household. Before the resulting consternation, masculine and feminine, he was always apologetic. He was on the friendliest terms with things ill-reputed, even abhorrent, and could not understand the qualms of the delicate. He was said to have held up once, in all innocence, before a class of school-girls a wriggling snake. The shrieks and confusion brought him to a sense of what he had done. He apologised elaborately, the foreign peculiarity he never lost running through his confusion. "Poor girls, I vill not do it again. Next time I vill bring in a nice, clean leetle feesh." Agassiz took no pleasure in shocking his class; on the contrary he was most anxious to engage and hold them. So too, if his audience was made up from people of the simplest. In fact, for each he exerted his powers as generously as when addressing a company of savants. He always kindled as he spoke, and with a marvellous magnetism communicated his glow to those who listened. I have seen him stand before his class holding in his hand the claw of a crustacean. In his earnestness it seemed to be for him the centre of the creation, and he made us all share his belief. Indeed, he convinced us. Running back from it in an almost infinite series was the many-ordered life adhering at last and scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic matter to which it clung. Forward from it again ran the series not less long and complicated which fulfilled itself at last in the brain and soul of man. What he held in his hand was a central link. His colour came and went, his eye danced and his tones grew deep and tremulous, as he dwelt on the illimitable chain of being. With a few strokes on the blackboard, he presented graphically the most intricate variations. He felt the sublimity of what he was contemplating, and we glowed with him from the contagion of his fervour. I have never heard his equal as an expounder of the deep things of nature. He gloried in the exercise of his power, though hampered by poverty. "I have no time to make money," he cried. He sought no title but that of teacher. To do anything else was only to misuse his gift. In his desk he was an inspirer, but hardly more so than in private talk. I recall walks we took with him to study natural objects and especially the striated rocks, which, as he had detected, bore plain evidence that the configuration of the region had been shaped by glaciers. He was charmingly affable, encouraging our questions, and unwearied in his demonstration. "Professor," I said once, "you teach us that in creation things rise from high to higher in the vast series until at last we come to man. Why stop with man? why not conclude that as man surpasses what went before, so he in turn will be surpassed and supplanted by a being still superior;—and so on and on?" I well recall the solemnity of his face as he replied that I was touching upon the deepest things, not to be dealt with in an afternoon ramble. He would only say then that there could be nothing higher than a man with his spirit.
Whether Agassiz was as broad-minded as he was high-minded may be argued. The story ran that when the foundations of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy were going on in Divinity Avenue, a theological professor encountering the scientist among the shadows the latter was invading, courteously bade him welcome. He hoped the old Divinity Hall would be a good neighbour to the pile rising opposite. "Yes," was the bluff reply, "and I hope to see the time when it will be turned into a dormitory for my scientific students." They were quickly spoken, unmeditated words without intention of rudeness, but wrapped in his specialty he was rather careless as to what he might shoulder out. Again, we had in our company a delicate, nervous fellow who turned out to be a spiritualistic medium, and who was soon subjected to an investigation in which professors took part, which was certainly rough and ready. Agassiz speedily came to the conclusion that the young man was an impostor and deserved no mercy. Some of us felt that the determination was hasty. There was a possibility of honest self-deception; and then who could say that the mysteries had been fathomed that involved the play of the psychic forces? Possibly a calmer and more candid mood might have befitted the investigation. At any rate in these later days such a mood has been maintained by inquirers like William James and the Society for Psychical Research. These are straws, but it is hardly a straw that when Darwinism emerged upon the world, winning such speedy and almost universal adherence among scientific men and revolutionising in general the thought of the world as to the method of creation, Agassiz stood almost solitary among authorities rejecting evolution and clinging to the doctrine of a special calling into being of each species. His stand against the new teaching was definite and bold, but can it be called broad-minded? This is but the limitation that makes human a greatness which the world regards with thorough and affectionate reverence. Fortunate are those in whose memories live the voice and countenance of Louis Agassiz.
Those whose privilege it was to know both father and son will be slow to admit that the elder Agassiz was the greater man. Alexander (to his intimates he was always, affectionately, Alex), was a teacher only transiently, and I believe never before a class showed the enkindling power which in the father was so marked a gift. His attainments, however, were probably not less great, and it remains to be seen whether his discoveries were not as epoch-making. He possessed, moreover, a versatility which his father never showed (perhaps because he never took time to show it), standing as a brilliant figure among financiers and captains of industry. Finally, in a high sense, Alexander was a philanthropist, and his benefactions were no more munificent than they were wisely applied; for he watched well his generous hand, guiding the flow into channels where it might most effectually revive and enrich. While possibly in the case of the elder Agassiz, the recognition of truth was sometimes unduly circumscribed, that could never be said of Alexander. He was eminently broad-minded, estimating with just candour whatever might be advanced in his own field, and outside of his field, entering with sympathetic interest into all that life might present.
I recall him first on a day soon after our entrance into college in 1851. A civic celebration was to take place in Boston, and the Harvard students were to march in the procession. That day I first heard Fair Harvard, sonorously rendered by the band at the head of our column, as we formed on the Beacon Street mall before the State House. A boy of sixteen, dressed in gray, came down the steps to take his place in our class—a handsome fellow, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, trimly built, and well-grown for his years. His face had a foreign air, and when he spoke a peculiarity marked his speech. This he never lost, but it was no imperfection. Rather it gave distinction to his otherwise perfect English. In the years of our course, we met daily. He was a good general scholar but with a preference from the first for natural science and mathematics. He matured into handsome manhood, and as an athlete was among the best. He was a master of the oar, not dropping it on graduation, but long a familiar figure on the Charles. Here incidentally he left upon the University a curious and lasting mark. The crew one day were exercising bare-headed on the Back Bay, when encountering stress of weather, Agassiz was sent up into the city to find some proper head-gear. He presently returned with a package of handkerchiefs of crimson, which so demonstrated their convenience and played a part on so many famous occasions, that crimson became the Harvard colour.
Alexander was soon absorbed in the whirl of life, and to what purpose he worked I need not here detail. The story of the Calumet and Hecla Company is a kind of commercial romance which the harshest critics of American business life may read with pleasure. At the same time Agassiz was only partially and transiently a business-man, returning always with haste from the mine and the counting-room to the protracted scientific researches in which his heart mainly lay. His voyages in the interest of science were many and long. He studied not so much the shores as the sea itself. Oceanographer is the term perhaps by which he may best be designated. By deep sea soundings he mapped the vast beds over which the waters roll and reached an intimacy with the life of its most profound abysses. Sitting next him at a class dinner, an affair of dress-suits, baked meats, and cigars at the finish, I found his talk took one far away from the prose of the thing. He was charming in conversation, and he set forth at length his theory as to the work of the coral insects, formed after long study of the barrier reefs and atolls of remote seas. His ideas were subversive of those of Darwin, with whom he disputed the matter before Darwin died. They are now well-known and I think accepted, though unfortunately he died before setting them forth in due order. They are revolutionary in their character as to the origin of formations that enter largely into the crust of the earth. In this field he stood as originator and chief. He gave me glimpses of the wonderful indeed, as we cracked our almonds and sipped the sherbet, his rich voice and slightly foreign accent running at my ear as we sat under the banquet lights.
Though oceanography was his special field, his tastes and attainments were comprehensive and he was a man of repute in many ways. He was a trained and skilled engineer and mathematician, and an adept in the most various branches of natural science. At another class dinner, when I was so fortunate as to sit beside him, his interest in botany came out as he spoke of the enjoyment he took in surveying from the roof of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy the trees of Cambridge, the masses of foliage here and there appearing from that point in special beauty. I spoke of the paper just read by Francis Darwin, the son of Charles, before the British Association, emphasising the idea that the life of plants and animals differs not in kind but only in degree. Plants may have memory, perhaps show passion, predatory instincts, or rudimentary intelligence. The plant-world is therefore part and parcel of animated nature. Agassiz announced with real fervour his adherence to that belief and cited interesting facts in its support. Subtle links binding plant and animal reveal themselves everywhere to investigation. In evolution from the primeval monads, or whatever starting-points there were, the fittest always survived as the outpoured life flowed abundantly along the million lines of development. There was a brotherhood between man and not only the zoöphyte, but still further down, even with the ultimate cell in which organisation can first be traced, only faintly distinguishable from the azoic rock on which it hangs.
As he talked I thought of the ample spaces of his Museum where the whole great scheme is made manifest to the eye, the structure of man, then the slow gradation downward, the immense series of flowers and plants counterfeited in glass continuing the line unbroken, down to the ultimate lichen, all but part and parcel of the ledge to which it clings.
My tastes were not in the direction of mathematics or natural science, and it was not until our later years that we came into close touch. In the hospice of the Grimsel, in the heart of the Alps, as I sat down to dinner after a day of hard walking, I saw my classmate in a remote part of the room with his wife and children and a group of Swiss friends. I determined not to intrude, but as the dinner ended, coming from his place he sought me out. "I heard your voice," he said, "and knew you were here before I saw you." We chatted genially. That day, he said, he had visited the site of his father's hut on the Aar glacier, where the observations were made on which was based the glacial theory. On that visit he had, as a small boy, been carried up in a basket on the back of a guide. He had not been there since until that day. He was that night in the environment into which he had been born, and assumed toward me the attitude of a host making at home a stranger guest. To my question as to how a transient passer like myself could best see a great ice river, he replied, "Climb to-morrow the Aeggisch-horn, and look down from there upon the Aletsch glacier. You will have under your eye all the more interesting and important phenomena relating to the matter." We parted next morning. I had enjoyed a great privilege, for he was the man of all men to meet in such a place,—a feeling deepened a day or two later, when I looked down from the peak he had indicated upon this wide-stretching glacier below.
As age drew on he mellowed well. Perhaps sympathy with men and things outside his special walk was no stronger than in earlier years, but it had readier expression. I heard from him this good story. President Eliot was once showing about the university a multimillionaire and his wife who had the good purpose to endow a great school of learning in the West. Having made the survey, they stood in Memorial Hall, about to say good-bye. "Well, Mr. Eliot," said the wife, "How much money have you invested?" Mr. Eliot stated to her the estimated value of the university assets. The lady turning to her husband, exclaimed, with a touch of the feeling that money will buy everything, "Oh, husband, we can do better than that." Said Mr. Eliot, with a wave of the hand toward the ancient portraits on the walls: "Madame, we have one thing which money cannot buy,—nearly three centuries of devotedness!" There is fine appreciation of a precious possession in this remark. In other ways Harvard may be surpassed. Other institutions may easily have more money, more students. As able men may be in other faculties possibly (I will admit even this) there may be elsewhere better football. But that through eight generations there has been in the hearts of the best men, a constant all-absorbing devotion to the institution, is a thing for America unique, and which cannot be taken away. How stimulating is this to a noble loyalty in these later generations! The old college is a thing to be watchfully and tenderly shielded. As Alexander told me the story, I felt in his manner and intonation that the three centuries of devotedness had had great influence with him. As John Harvard had been the first of the liberal givers, so he was the last, and I suppose the greatest. The money value of his gifts is very large, but who will put a value upon the labour, the watchfulness, the expert guidance exercised by such a man, unrequited and almost without intermission throughout a long life! His fine nature, no doubt, prompted the consecration, but the old devotedness spurred him to emulation of those who had gone before.
In 1909 I enjoyed through Agassiz a great pleasure. He invited me to his house where I found gathered a company of his friends, many of them men of eminence. He had just returned from his journey in East Africa, during which he had penetrated far into the interior, studying with his usual diligence the natural history of the regions. He entertained us with an informal talk beautifully and profusely illustrated by photographs. I have said that he did not possess, or at any rate, never showed his father's power of kindling speech. So far as I know he never addressed large popular audiences. Nevertheless to a circle of scientific specialists, or people intelligent in a general way, he could present a subject charmingly, in clear, calm, fluent speech. On this occasion he was at his best, and it was a pleasure indeed to have the marvels of that freshly-opened land described to us by the man who of all men perhaps was best able to cope with the story. I listened with delight and awe. He was an old man crowned with the highest distinctions. I thought of the young handsome boy I had seen coming down in his grey suit into the Beacon Street mall, while the band played Fair Harvard. On the threshold I shook his hand and looked into his dark, kindly eyes. I turned away in the darkness and saw him no more.