Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence

by Louis Agassiz

The make-up of the settlement was somewhat anomalous. The house, though not large, was sufficiently roomy, and soon after Agassiz was established there he had the pleasure of receiving under his roof certain friends and former colleagues, driven from their moorings in Europe by the same disturbances which had prevented him from returning there. The arrival among them of Mr. Guyot, with whom his personal and scientific intimacy was of such long standing, was a great happiness. It was especially a blessing at this time, for troubles at home weighed upon Agassiz and depressed him. His wife, always delicate in health, had died, and although his children were most affectionately provided for in her family and his own, they were separated from each other, as well as from him; nor did he think it wise to bring them while so young, to America. The presence, therefore, of one who was almost like a brother in sympathy and companionship, was now more than welcome. His original staff of co-workers and assistants still continued with him, and there were frequent guests besides, chiefly foreigners, who, on arriving in a new country, found their first anchorage and point of departure in this little European settlement.

The house stood in a small plot of ground, the cultivation of which was the delight of papa Christinat. It soon became a miniature zoological garden, where all sorts of experiments in breeding and observations on the habits of animals, were carried on. A tank for turtles and a small alligator in one corner, a large hutch for rabbits in another, a cage for eagles against the wall, a tame bear and a family of opossums, made up the menagerie, varied from time to time by new arrivals.

But Agassiz could not be long in any place without beginning to form a museum. When he accepted the chair offered him at Cambridge, there were neither collections nor laboratories belonging to his department. The specimens indispensable to his lectures were gathered almost by the day, and his outfit, with the exception of the illustrations he had brought from Europe, consisted of a blackboard and a lecture-room. There was no money for the necessary objects, and the want of it had to be supplied by the professor's own industry and resources. On the banks of the Charles River, just where it is crossed by Brighton Bridge, was an old wooden shanty set on piles; it might have served perhaps, at some time, as a bathing or a boat house. The use of this was allowed Agassiz for the storing of such collections as he had brought together. Pine shelves nailed against the walls served for cases, and with a table or two for dissection this rough shelter was made to do duty as a kind of laboratory. The fact is worth noting, for here was the beginning of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, now admitted to a place among the great institutions of its kind in the world.

In the summer of 1848 Agassiz organized an expedition entirely after his own heart, inasmuch as it combined education with observation in the field. The younger portion of the party consisted of several of his special pupils, and a few other Harvard students who joined the expedition from general interest. Beside these, there were several volunteer members, who were either naturalists or had been attracted to the undertaking by their love of nature and travel. Their object was the examination of the eastern and northern shores of Lake Superior from Sault Ste. Marie to Fort William, a region then little known to science or to tourists. Agassiz taught along the road. At evening, around the camp-fire, or when delayed by weather or untoward circumstances, he would give to his companions short and informal lectures, it might be on the forest about them, or on the erratic phenomena in the immediate neighborhood,—on the terraces of the lake shore, or on the fish of its waters. His lecture-room, in short, was everywhere; his apparatus a traveling blackboard and a bit of chalk; while his illustrations and specimens lay all around him, wherever the party chanced to be.

To Agassiz himself the expedition was of the deepest interest. Glacial phenomena had, as we have seen, met him at every turn since his arrival in the United States, but nowhere had he found them in greater distinctness than on the shores of Lake Superior. As the evidence accumulated about him, he became more than ever satisfied that the power which had modeled and grooved the rocks all over the country, and clothed it with a sheet of loose material reaching to the sea, must have been the same which had left like traces in Europe. In a continent of wide plains and unbroken surfaces, and, therefore, with few centres of glacial action, the phenomena were more widely and uniformly scattered than in Europe. But their special details, down to the closest minutiae, were the same, while their definite circumscription and evenness of distribution forbade the idea of currents or floods as the moving cause. Here, as elsewhere, Agassiz recognized at once the comprehensive scope of the phenomena. The whole history reconstructed itself in his mind, to the time when a sheet of ice clothed the land, reaching the Atlantic sea-board, as it now does the coast of Spitzbergen and the Arctic shores.

He made also a careful survey of the local geology of Lake Superior, and especially of the system of dykes, by the action of which he found that its bed had been excavated, and the outline of its shores determined. But perhaps the inhabitants of the lake itself occupied him even more than its conformation or its surrounding features. Not only for its own novelty and variety, but for its bearing on the geographical distribution of animals, the fauna of this great sheet of fresh water interested him deeply. On this journey he saw at Niagara for the first time a living gar-pike, the only representative among modern fishes of the fossil type of Lepidosteus. From this type he had learned more perhaps than from any other, of the relations between the past and the present fishes. When a student of nineteen years of age, his first sight of a stuffed skin of a gar-pike in the Museum of Carlsruhe told him that it stood alone among living fishes. Its true alliance with the Lepidosteus of the early geological ages became clear to him only later in his study of the fossil fishes. He then detected the reptilian character of the type, and saw that from the articulation of the vertebrae the head must have moved more freely on the trunk than that of any fish of our days. To his great delight, when the first living specimen of the gar-pike, or modern Lepidosteus, was brought to him, it moved its head to the right and left and upward, as a Saurian does and as no other fish can.

The result of this expedition was a valuable collection of fishes and a report upon the fauna and the geology of Lake Superior, comprising the erratic phenomena. A narrative written by James Elliot Cabot formed the introduction to the report, and it was also accompanied by two or three shorter contributions on special subjects from other members of the party. The volume was illustrated by a number of plates exquisitely drawn and colored on stone by A. Sonrel.

This was not Agassiz's first publication in America. His "Principles of Zoology" (Agassiz and Gould) was published in 1848. The book had a large sale, especially for schools. Edition followed edition, but the sale of the first part was checked by the want of the second, which was never printed. Agassiz was always swept along so rapidly by the current of his own activity that he was sometimes forced to leave behind him unfinished work. Before the time came for the completion of the second part of the zoology, his own knowledge had matured so much, that to be true to the facts, he must have remodeled the whole of the first part, and for this he never found the time. Apropos of these publications the following letters are in place.

FROM SIR RODERICK MURCHISON.

BELGRAVE SQUARE, October 3, 1849.