In the summer of 1847 Agassiz established himself in a small house at East Boston, sufficiently near the sea to be a convenient station for marine collections. Here certain members of his old working corps assembled about him, and it soon became, like every place he had ever inhabited, a hive of industry. Chief among his companions were Count Francois de Pourtales, who had accompanied him to this country; Mr. E. Desor, who soon followed him to America; and Mr. Jacques Burkhardt, who had preceded them all, and was now draughtsman in chief to the whole party. To his labors were soon added those of Mr. A. Sonrel, the able lithographic artist, who illustrated the most important works subsequently published by Agassiz. To an exquisite skill in his art he added a quick, intelligent perception of structural features from the naturalist's point of view, which made his work doubly valuable. Besides those above-mentioned, there were several assistants who shared the scientific work in one department or another.
It must be confessed that this rather original establishment had the aspect of a laboratory rather than a home, domestic comfort being subordinate to scientific convenience. Every room served in some sort the purposes of an aquarium or a studio, while garret and cellar were devoted to collections. The rules of the household were sufficiently elastic to suit the most erratic student. A sliding scale for meals allowed the greatest freedom for excursions along the neighboring shores and beaches, and punctuality in work was the only punctuality demanded.
Agassiz himself was necessarily often absent, for the maintenance of the little colonydepended in great degree upon his exertions. During the winter of 1847, while continuing his lectures in Boston and its vicinity, he lectured in other places also. It is difficult to track his course at this time; but during the winters of 1847 and 1848 he lectured in all the large eastern cities, New York, Albany, Philadelphia, and Charleston, S.C. Everywhere he drew large crowds, and in those days his courses of lectures were rarely allowed to close without some public expression of gratitude and appreciation from the listeners. Among his papers are preserved several sets of resolutions from medical and scientific societies, from classes of students, and from miscellaneous audiences, attesting the enthusiasm awakened by his instruction. What he earned in this way enabled him to carry on his work and support his assistants. Still, the strain upon his strength, combined with all that he was doing beside in purely scientific work, was severe, and before the twelvemonth was out he was seriously ill. At this time Dr. B.E. Cotting, a physician whose position as curator of the Lowell Institute had brought him into contact with Agassiz, took him home to his house in the country, where he tended him through some weeks of tedious illness, hastening his convalescence by excursions in all the neighboring country, from which they returned laden with specimens,—plants, birds, etc. In this hospitable home he passed his fortieth birthday, the first in this country. His host found him standing thoughtful and abstracted by the window. "Why so sad?" he asked. "That I am so old, and have done so little," was the answer.
After a few weeks he was able to return to his work, and the next letter gives some idea of his observations, especially upon the traces of glacial action in the immediate vicinity of Boston and upon the shores of Massachusetts Bay. Indeed, he never lost sight of these features, which had caught his attention the moment he landed on the continent. In one of his later lectures he gives a striking account of this first impression.
"In the autumn of 1846," he says, "six years after my visit to Great Britain in search of glaciers, I sailed for America. When the steamer stopped at Halifax, eager to set foot on the new continent so full of promise for me, I sprang on shore and started at a brisk pace for the heights above the landing. On the first undisturbed ground, after leaving the town, I was met by the familiar signs, the polished surfaces, the furrows and scratches, the LINE ENGRAVING, so well known in the Old World; and I became convinced of what I had already anticipated as the logical sequence of my previous investigations, that here also this great agent had been at work." The incident seems a very natural introduction to the following letter, written a few months later:—
TO ELIE DE BEAUMONT.
BOSTON, August 31, 1847.
. . .I have waited to write until I should have some facts sufficiently important to claim your attention. In truth, the study of the marine animals, which I am, for the first time, able to observe in their natural conditions of existence, has engrossed me almost exclusively since I came to the United States, and only incidentally, as it were, I have turned my attention to paleontology and geology. I must, however, except the glacial phenomena, a problem, the solution of which always interests me deeply. This great question, far from presenting itself more simply here, is complicated by peculiarities never brought to my notice in Europe. Happily for me, Mr. Desor, who had been in Scandinavia before joining me here, called my attention at once to certain points of resemblance between the phenomena there and those which I had seen in the neighborhood of Boston. Since then, we have made several excursions together, have visited Niagara, and, in short, have tried to collect all the special facts of glacial phenomena in America. . .You are, no doubt, aware that the whole rocky surface of the ground here is polished. I do not think that anywhere in the world there exist polished and rounded rocks in better preservation or on a larger scale. Here, as elsewhere, erratic debris are scattered over these surfaces, scratched pebbles impacted in mud, forming unstratified masses mixed with and covered by large erratic boulders, more or less furrowed or scratched, the upper ones being usually angular and without marks. The absence of moraines, properly so-called, in a country so little broken, is not surprising; I have, however, seen very distinct ones in some valleys of the White Mountains and in Vermont. Up to this time there had been nothing very new in the aspect of the phenomena as a whole; but on examining attentively the internal arrangement of all these materials, especially in the neighborhood of the sea, one soon becomes convinced that the ocean has partially covered and more or less remodeled them. In certain places there are patches of stratified sand interposed between masses of glacial drift-deposit; elsewhere, banks of sand and pebbles crown the irregularities of the glacial deposit, or fill in its depressions; in other localities the glacial pebbles may be washed and completely cleared of mud, retaining, however, their markings; or again, these markings may have disappeared, and the material is arranged in lines or ramparts, as it were, of diverse conformation, in which Mr. Desor recognized all the modifications of the "oesars" of Scandinavia. The disposition of the oesars, as seen here, is evidently due entirely to the action of the waves, and their frequency along the coast is a proof of this. In a late excursion with Captain Davis on board a government vessel I learned to understand the mode of formation of the submarine dikes bordering the coast at various distances, which would be oesars were they elevated; with the aid of the dredge I satisfied myself of their identity. With these facts before me I cannot doubt that the oesars of the United States consist essentially of glacial material remodeled by the sea; while farther inland, though here and there reaching the sea-coast, we have unchanged glacial drift deposit. At some points the alteration is so slight as to denote only a momentary rise of the sea. Under these circumstances one would naturally look for fossils in the drift, and M. Desor, in company with M. de Pourtales, was the first to find them, at Brooklyn, in Long Island, which lies to the south of New York. They were imbedded in a glacial clay deposit, having all the ordinary character of such deposits, with only slight traces of stratified sand. It is true that the greater number of these fossils (all belonging to species now living on the coast) were broken into angular fragments, not excepting even the thick tests of the Venus mercenaria. . .
The suburb of Boston where I am living (East Boston) is built on an island, one kilometer and a half long, extending from north to southeast, and varying in width at different points from two to six or seven hundred metres. Its height above the sea-level is about sixty feet. This little island is composed entirely of glacial muddy deposit, containing scratched pebbles mixed with larger boulders or blocks, and covered also with a considerable number of boulders of divers forms and dimensions. At East Boston you cannot see what underlies this deposit; but no doubt it rests upon a rounded mass of granite, polished and grooved like several others in Boston harbor. . .
In our journey to Niagara, Mr. Desor and I assured ourselves that the river deposits, in which, among other things, the mastodon is found with the fresh-water shells of Goat Island, are posterior to the drift. It is a fact worth consideration that the mastodons found in Europe are buried in true tertiary formations, while the great mastodon of the United States is certainly posterior to the drift. . .In another letter I will tell you something of my observations upon the geographical distribution of marine animals at different depths and on different bottoms, and also upon the relations between this distribution and that of the fossils in the tertiary deposits. . .* (* I have left out a portion of this letter which appeared in the first edition of the book, because I learned that the facts there given concerning the deposit of Zostera marina were not substantiated, and that Agassiz consequently did not forward the letter in its first form. The remainder of this chapter appears in this edition for the first time.—E.C.A.)