Within three months Cuvier fell under a stroke of paralysis, and shortly died. The day before the attack he had said to Agassiz, "Be careful, and remember that work kills." We doubt if it often kills naturalists, unless when, like Cuvier, they also become statesmen.
But to live and work, the naturalist must be fed. It was a perplexing problem how possibly to remain a while longer in Paris, which was essential to the carrying on of his work, and to find the means of supplying his very simple wants. And here the most charming letters in these volumes are, first, the one from his mother, full of tender thoughtfulness, and making the first suggestion about Neuchâtel and its museum, as a place where the aspiring naturalist might secure something more substantial than "brilliant hopes" to live upon; next, that from Agassiz to his father, who begs to be told as much as he can be supposed to understand of the nature of this work upon fossil fishes, which called for so much time, labor, and expense; and, almost immediately, Agassiz's letter to his parents, telling them that Humboldt had, quite spontaneously and unexpectedly, relieved his present anxieties by a credit of a thousand francs, to be increased, if necessary. Humboldt had shown a friendly interest in him from the first, and had undertaken to negotiate with Cotta, the publisher, in his behalf; but, becoming uneasy by the delay, and feeling that "a man so laborious, so gifted, and so deserving of affection ... should not be left in a position where lack of serenity disturbs his power of work," he delicately pressed the acceptance of this aid as a confidential transaction between two friends of unequal age.
Indeed, the relations between the "two friends," one at that time sixty-three, and the other twenty-five, were very beautiful, and so continued, as the correspondence shows. Humboldt's letters (we wish there were more of them) are particularly delightful, are full of wit and wisdom, of almost paternal solicitude, and of excellent counsel. He enjoins upon Agassiz to finish what he has in hand before taking up new tasks (this is in 1837), not to spread his intellect over too many subjects at once, nor to go on enlarging the works he had undertaken; he predicts the pecuniary difficulties in which expansion would be sure to land him, bewails the glacier investigations, and closes with "a touch of fun, in order that my letter may seem a little less like preaching. A thousand affectionate remembrances. No more ice, not much of echinoderms, plenty of fish, recall of ambassadors in partibus, and great severity toward booksellers, an infernal race, two or three of which have been killed under me."
The ambassadors in partibus were the artists Agassiz employed and sent to England or elsewhere to draw fossil fishes for him in various museums, at a cost which Humboldt knew would be embarrassing. The ice, which he would have no more of, refers to the glacier researches upon which Agassiz was entering with ardor, laying one of the solid foundations of his fame. Curiously enough, both Humboldt and Von Buch, with all their interest in Agassiz, were quite unable to comprehend the importance of an inquiry which was directly in their line, and, indeed, they scorned it; while the young naturalist, without training in physics or geology, but with the insight of genius, at once developed the whole idea of the glacial period, with its wonderful consequences, upon his first inspection of the phenomena shown him by Charpentier in the valley of the Rhône.
It is well that Humboldt's advice was not heeded in this regard. Nevertheless he was a wise counsellor. He saw the danger into which his young friend's enthusiasm and boundless appetite for work was likely to lead him. For Agassiz it might be said, with a variation of the well-known adage, that there was nothing he touched that he did not aggrandize. Everything he laid hold of grew larger under his hand—grew into a mountain threatening to overwhelm him, and would have overwhelmed anyone whose powers were not proportionate to his aspirations. Established at Neuchâtel, and giving himself with ardor to the duties of his professorship, it was surely enough if he could do the author's share in the production of his great works on the fossil and the fresh-water fishes, without assuming the responsibilities and cares of publication as well, and even of a lithographic establishment which he set up mainly for his own use. But he carried pari passu, or nearly so, his work on fossil mollusca—a quarto volume with nearly a hundred plates—his monographs of echinoderms, living and fossil, his investigations of the embryological development of fishes, and that laborious work, the "Nomenclator Zoologicus," with the "Bibliographia," later published in England by the Ray Society. Moreover, of scattered papers, those of the Royal Society's Catalogue, which antedate his arrival in this country, are more than threescore and ten. He had help, indeed; but the more he had, the more he enlarged and diversified his tasks; Humboldt's sound advice about his zoölogical undertakings being no more heeded than his fulminations against the glacial theory.
In the midst of all this, Agassiz turned his glance upon the glaciers, and the "local phenomenon" became at once a cosmic one. So far a happy divination; but he seems to have believed quite to the last that, not only the temperate zones, but whole intertropical continents—at least the American—had been sheeted with ice. The narrative in the first volume will give the general reader a vivid but insufficient conception of the stupendous work upon which he so brilliantly labored for nearly a decade of years.
Cœlum, non animum, mutant who come with such a spirit to a wider and, scientifically, less developed continent. First as visitor, soon as denizen, and at length as citizen of the American republic, Agassiz rose with every occasion to larger and more various activities. What with the Lowell Institute, the college in Charleston, S. C., and Cornell University, in addition to Harvard, he may be said to have held three or four professorships at once, none of them sinecures. He had not been two months in the country before a staff of assistants was gathered around him, and a marine zoölogical laboratory was in operation. The rude shed on the shore, and the small wooden building at Cambridge, developed under his hand into the Museum of Zoölogy—if not as we see it now, yet into one of the foremost collections. Who can say what it would have been if his plans and ideas had obtained full recognition, and "expenditure" had seemed to the trustees, as it seemed to him, "the best investment;" or if efficient filial aid, not then to be dreamed of, had not given solid realization to the high paternal aspirations? In like manner grew large under his hand the Brazilian exploration, so generously provided for by a Boston citizen and fostered by an enlightened emperor; and on a similar scale was planned, and partly carried out, the "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States," as the imperial quarto work was modestly entitled, which was to be published "at the rate of one volume a year, each volume to contain about three hundred pages and twenty plates," with simple reliance upon a popular subscription; and so, indeed, of everything which this large-minded man undertook.
While Agassiz thus was a magnanimous man, in the literal as well as the accepted meaning of the word, he was also, as we have seen, a truly fortunate one. Honorable assistance came to him at critical moments, such as the delicate gift from Humboldt at Paris, which perhaps saved him to science; such as the Wollaston prize from the Geological Society in 1834, when he was struggling for the means of carrying on the "Fossil Fishes." The remainder of the deficit of this undertaking he was able to make up from his earliest earnings in America. For the rest, we all know how almost everything he desired—and he wanted nothing except for science—was cheerfully supplied to his hand by admiring givers. Those who knew the man during the twenty-seven years of his American life, can quite understand the contagious enthusiasm and confidence which he evoked. The impression will in some degree be transmitted by these pleasant and timely volumes, which should make the leading lines of the life of Agassiz clear to the newer generation, and deepen them in the memory of an older one.[Back to Contents]