But perhaps the greatest name associated with this period is that of the great scientist, Agassiz. Agassiz is a striking example of the possibilities of courage and a lively faith. He never had any money; and yet he invariably lived as if he possessed a comfortable competence. “I have no time for making money,” is one of his sayings that have become famous. He was a native of Orbe, a beautiful town in the Jura. His father was a pastor, and the young Agassiz was intended for the medical profession. He took the medical degree, but remained steadfast in his determination to become, as he told his father, “the first naturalist of his time.” Humboldt and Cuvier soon discovered his powers; in due time he became a professor at Neuchâtel. He married on eighty louis a year; but money difficulties never depressed him. As a boy of twenty, earning the princely sum of fifty pounds a year, he maintained a secretary in his employment, a luxury which he never denied himself. Usually he maintained two or three. At Neuchâtel, his income eventually increased to £125 a year. On this, he kept up an academy of natural history, a museum, a staff of secretaries and assistants, a lithographic and printing plant, and a wife. His wife, by the way, was a German lady; and it is not surprising that her chief quarrel with life was a lack of money for household expenses. The naturalist, who had no time for making money, spent what little he had on the necessities of his existence, such as printing presses and secretaries, and left the luxuries of the larder to take care of themselves. His family helped him with loans, “at first,” we are told, “with pleasure, but afterwards with some reluctance.” Humboldt also advanced small sums. “I was pleased to remain a debtor to Humboldt,” writes Agassiz, a sentiment which probably awakens more sympathy in the heart of the average undergraduate than it did in the bosom of Humboldt.
A holiday which Agassiz spent with another great naturalist, Charpentier, was indirectly responsible for the beginnings of the glacial theory. Throughout Switzerland, you may find huge boulders known as erratic blocks. These blocks have a different geological ancestry from the rocks in the immediate neighbourhood. They did not grow like mushrooms, and they must therefore have been carried to their present position by some outside agency. In the eighteenth century, naturalists solved all these questions by a priori theories, proved by quotations from the book of Genesis. The Flood was a favourite solution, and the Flood was, therefore, invoked to solve the riddle of erratic blocks. By the time that Agassiz had begun his great work, the Flood was, however, becoming discredited, and its reputed operations were being driven further afield.
The discovery of the true solution was due, not to a scientist, but to a simple chamois hunter, named Perrandier. He knew no geology, but he could draw obvious conclusions from straightforward data without invoking the Flood. He had seen these blocks on glaciers, and he had seen them many miles away from glaciers. He made the only possible deduction—that glaciers must, at some time, have covered the whole of Switzerland. Perrandier expounded his views to a civil engineer, by name Venetz. Venetz passed it on to Charpentier, and Charpentier converted Agassiz. Agassiz made prompt use of the information, so prompt that Charpentier accused him of stealing his ideas. He read a paper before the Helvetic Society, in which he announced his conviction that the earth had once been covered with a sheet of ice that extended from the North Pole to Central Asia. The scepticism with which this was met incited Agassiz to search for more evidence in support of his theory. His best work was done in “The Hôtel des Neuchâtelois.” This hôtel at first consisted of an overhanging boulder, the entrance of which was screened by a blanket. The hôtel was built near the Grimsel on the medial moraine of the lower Aar glacier. To satisfy Mrs. Agassiz, her husband eventually moved into even more palatial quarters to wit, a rough cabin covered with canvas. “The outer apartment,” complains Mrs. Agassiz, a lady hard to please, “boasted a table and one or two benches; even a couple of chairs were kept as seats of honour for occasional guests. A shelf against the wall accommodated books, instruments, coats, etc.; and a plank floor on which to spread their blankets at night was a good exchange for the frozen surface of the glacier.” But the picture of this strange ménage would be incomplete without mention of Agassiz’s companions. “Agassiz and his companions” is a phrase that meets us at every turn of his history. He needed companions, partly because he was of a friendly and companionable nature, partly, no doubt, to vary the monotony of Mrs. Agassiz’s constant complaints, but mainly because his ambitious schemes were impossible without assistance. His work involved great expenditure, which he could only recoup in part from the scanty grants allowed him by scientific societies, and the patronage of occasional wealthy amateurs. The first qualification necessary in a “companion” was a certain indifference as to salary, and the usual arrangement was that Agassiz should provide board and lodging in the hôtel, and that, if his assistant were in need of money, Agassiz should provide some if he had any lying loose at the time. This at least was the substance of the contract between Agassiz, on the one hand, and Edouard Desor of Heidelberg University, on the other hand.
Desor is perhaps the most famous of the little band. He was a political refugee, “without visible means of subsistence.” He was a talented young gentleman with a keen interest in scientific disputes, and an eye for what is vulgarly known as personal advertisement. In other words he shared the very human weakness of enjoying the sight of his name in honoured print. Another companion was Karl Vogt. Mrs. Agassiz had two great quarrels with life. The first was a shortage of funds, and the second was the impropriety of the stories exchanged between Vogt and Desors. Another companion was a certain Gressly, a gentleman whose main charm for Agassiz consisted in the fact that, “though he never had any money, he never wanted any.” He lived with Agassiz in the winter as secretary. In summer he tramped the Jura in search of geological data. He never bothered about money, but was always prepared to exchange some good anecdotes for a night’s lodging. Eventually, he went mad and ended his days in an asylum. Yet another famous name, associated with Agassiz, is that of Dollfus-Ausset, an Alsatian of Mülhausen, who was born in 1797. His great works were two books, the first entitled Materials for the Study of Glaciers, and the second Materials for the Dyeing of Stuffs. On the whole, he seems to have been more interested in glaciers than in velvet. He made, with Desor, the first ascent of the Galenstock, and also of the most southern peak of the Wetterhorn, namely the Rosenhorn (12,110 feet). He built many observatories on the Aar glacier and the Theodule, and he was usually known as “Papa Gletscher Dollfus.”
Such, then, were Agassiz’s companions. Humour and romance are blended in the picture of the strange little company that gathered every evening beneath the rough shelter of the hôtel. We see Mrs. Agassiz bearing with admirable resignation those inconveniences that must have proved a very real sorrow to her orderly German mind. We see Desor and Vogt exchanging broad anecdotes to the indignation of the good lady; and we can figure the abstracted naturalist, utterly indifferent to his environment, and only occupied with the deductions that may be drawn from the movement of stakes driven into a glacier. Let me quote in conclusion a few words from a sympathetic appreciation by the late William James (Memories and Studies)—
“Agassiz was a splendid example of the temperament that looks forward and not backwards, and never wastes a moment in regrets for the irrevocable. I had the privilege of admission to his society during the Thayer expedition to Brazil. I well remember, at night, as we all swung in our hammocks, in the fairy like moonlight, on the deck of the steamer that throbbed its way up the Amazon between the forests guarding the stream on either side, how he turned and whispered, ‘James, are you awake?’ and continued, ‘I cannot sleep; I am too happy; I keep thinking of these glorious plans.’...
“Agassiz’s influence on methods of teaching in our community was prompt and decisive—all the more so that it struck people’s imagination by its very excess. The good old way of committing printed abstractions to memory seems never to have received such a shock as it encountered at his hands. There is probably no public school teacher who will not tell you how Agassiz used to lock a student up in a room full of turtle shells or lobster shells or oyster shells, without a book or word to help him, and not let him out till he had discovered all the truths which the objects contained. Some found the truths after weeks and months of lonely sorrow; others never found them. Those who found them were already made into naturalists thereby; the failures were blotted from the book of honour and of life. ‘Go to Nature; take the facts into your own hands; look and see for yourself’—these were the maxims which Agassiz preached wherever he went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric....
“The only man he really loved and had use for was the man who could bring him facts. To see facts, not to argue or raisonniren was what life meant for him; and I think he often positively loathed the ratiocinating type of mind. ‘Mr. Blank, you are totally uneducated,’ I heard him say once to a student, who had propounded to him some glittering theoretic generality. And on a similar occasion, he gave an admonition that must have sunk deep into the heart of him to whom it was addressed. ‘Mr. X, some people perhaps now consider you are a bright young man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you then, what they will say will be this: “That Mr. X—oh yes, I know him; he used to be a very bright young man.”’ Happy is the conceited youth who at the proper moment receives such salutary cold-water therapeutics as this, from one who in other respects is a kind friend.”
So much for Agassiz. It only remains to add that his companions were responsible for some fine mountaineering. During these years the three peaks of the Wetterhorn were climbed, and Desor was concerned in two of these successful expeditions. A far finer expedition was his ascent of the Lauteraarhorn, by Desor in 1842. This peak is connected with the Schreckhorn by a difficult ridge, and is a worthy rival to that well-known summit. There were a few other virgin climbs in this period, but the great age of Alpine conquest had scarcely begun.
The connecting link between Agassiz and modern mountaineering is supplied by Gottlieb Studer, who was born in 1804, and died in 1890. His serious climbing began in 1823, and continued for sixty years. He made a number of new ascents, and reopened scores of passes, only known to natives. Most mountaineers know the careful and beautiful panoramas which are the work of his pencil. He drew no less than seven hundred of these. His great work, Ueber Eis und Schnee, a history of Swiss climbing, is an invaluable authority to which most of his successors in this field are indebted.
The careful reader will notice the comparative absence of the English in the climbs which we have so far described. The coming of the English deserves a chapter to itself.