Holmes was abstemious and never ceased talking—“Most men write too much. I would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes. But I have said Boston is the hub of the universe. I will rest upon that.”
All this report is singularly dry compared with the wit and humor which radiated about the table. We laughed till the tears ran down our cheeks. Longfellow was intensely amused. I have not seen him laugh so much for many a long day. We ladies sat at the table long after coffee and cigars in order to hear the talk....
Sumner said he had been much displeased by a remark Professor Henry Hunt made to him a few days ago. He said Mr. Agassiz was an impediment in the path of science. What did such men as Hunt and John Fiske mean by underrating a man who has given such books to the world as Agassiz has done, not to speak of his untiring efforts in the other avenues of influence! “It means just this,” said Holmes: “Agassiz will not listen to the Darwinian theory; his whole effort is on the other side. Now Agassiz is no longer young, and I was reading the other day in a book on the Sandwich Islands of an old Fejee man who had been carried away among strangers, but who prayed he might be carried home, that his brains might be beaten out in peace by his son according to the custom of those lands. It flashed over me then that our sons beat out our brains in the same way. They do not walk in our ruts of thoughts or begin exactly where we leave off, but they have a new standpoint of their own. At present the Darwinian theory can be nothing but an hypothesis; the important links of proof are missing and cannot be supplied; but in the myriad ages there may be new developments.”
I thought the young ladies looked a little tired sitting, so about nine o’clock we left the table—still the talk went on for about four hours when they broke up.
LOUIS AGASSIZ
With two letters from Dr. Holmes this rambling chronicle of his friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Fields must end. The first of the communications is a mere fragment of his everyday humor:
Beverly-Farms-by-the-Depot
July 18th, 1878