Among the zoologists of this country I would place Mr. Dana at the head. He is still very young, fertile in ideas, rich in facts, equally able as geologist and mineralogist. When his work on corals is completed, you can better judge of him. One of these days you will make him a correspondent of the Institute, unless he kills himself with work too early, or is led away by his tendency to generalization. Then there is Gould, author of the malacologic fauna of Massachusetts, and who is now working up the mollusks of the Wilkes Expedition. De Kay and Lea, whose works have long been known, are rather specialists, I should say. I do not yet know Holbrook personally. Pickering, of the Wilkes Expedition, is a well of science, perhaps the most erudite naturalist here. Haldeman knows the fresh-water gasteropods of this country admirably well, and has published a work upon them. Le Conte is a critical entomologist who seems to me thoroughly familiar with what is doing in Europe. In connection with Haldeman he is working up the articulates of the Wilkes Expedition. Wyman, recently made professor at Cambridge, is an excellent comparative anatomist, and the author of several papers on the organization of fishes. . .The botanists are less numerous, but Asa Gray and Dr. Torrey are known wherever the study of botany is pursued. Gray, with his indefatigable zeal, will gain upon his competitors. . .The geologists and mineralogists form the most numerous class among the savans of the country. The fact that every state has its corps of official geologists has tended to develop study in this direction to the detriment of other branches, and will later, I fear, tend to the detriment of science itself; for the utilitarian tendency thus impressed on the work of American geologists will retard their progress. With us, on the contrary, researches of this kind constantly tend to assume a more and more scientific character. Still, the body of American geologists forms, as a whole, a most respectable contingent. The names of Charles T. Jackson, James Hall, Hitchcock, Henry and William Rogers (two brothers), have long been familiar to European science. After the geologists, I would mention Dr. Morton, of Philadelphia, well known as the author of several papers upon fossils, and still better by his great work upon the indigenous races of America. He is a man of science in the best sense; admirable both as regards his knowledge and his activity. He is the pillar of the Philadelphia Academy.
The chemists and physicists, again, form another utilitarian class of men in this country. As with many of them purely scientific work is not their sole object, it is difficult for an outsider to distinguish between the clever manipulators and those who have higher aims. . .
The mathematicians have also their culte, dating back to Bowditch, the translator of the "Mecanique celeste," and the author of a work on practical navigation. He died in Boston, where they are now erecting a magnificent monument to his memory. Mr. Peirce, professor at Cambridge, is considered here the equal of our great mathematicians. It is not for me, who cannot do a sum in addition, to pretend to a judgment in the matter.* (* Though Agassiz was no mathematician, and Peirce no naturalist, they soon found that their intellectual aims were the same, and they became very close friends.)
You are familiar, no doubt, with the works of Captain Wilkes and the report of his journey around the world. His charts are much praised. The charts of the coasts and harbors of the United States, made under the direction of Dr. Bache and published at government expense, are admirable. The reports of Captain Fremont concerning his travels are also most interesting and instructive; to botanists especially so, on account of the scientific notes accompanying them.
I will not speak at length of my own work,—my letter is already too long. During the winter I have been chiefly occupied in making collections of fishes and birds, and also of the various woods. The forests here differ greatly from ours in the same latitude. I have even observed that they resemble astonishingly the forests of the Molasse epoch, and the analogy is heightened by that between the animals of this country and those of the eastern coasts of Asia as compared with those of the Molasse, such as the chelydras, andreas, etc. I will send a report upon this to M. Brongniart as soon as I have the time to prepare it. On the erratic phenomena, also, I have made numerous observations, which I am anxious to send to M. de Beaumont. These phenomena, so difficult of explanation with us, become still more complicated here, both on account of their contact with the sea and of the vast stretches of flat country over which they extend.
For the last few days I have been especially occupied with the development of the medusae. In studying the actiniae I have made a striking discovery, and I should be glad if you would communicate it to the Academy in advance of the illustrated paper on the same subject, which I hope soon to send you. Notwithstanding their star-like appearance, the star-fishes have, like the sea-urchins, indications by no means doubtful, of a symmetrical disposition of their organs in pairs, and an anterior and posterior extremity easily recognized by the special form of their oral opening. I have now satisfied myself that the madrepores have something analogous to this in the arrangement of their partitions, so that I am tempted to believe that this tendency to a symmetrical arrangement of parts in pairs, is a general character of polyps, disguised by their radiating form. Among the medusae something similar exists in the disposition of the marginal appendages and the ocelli. I attach the more importance to these observations, because they may lead to a clearer perception than we have yet reached of the natural relations between the radiates and the other great types of the animal kingdom.
This summer I hope to explore the lower lakes of Canada, and also the regions lying to the eastward as far as Nova Scotia; in the autumn I shall resume my excursions on the coast and in the Alleghenies, and shall pass a part of the winter in the Carolinas. I will soon write to Monsieur Brongniart concerning my plans for next year. If the Museum were desirous to aid me in my undertakings, I should like to make a journey of exploration next summer in a zone thus far completely neglected by naturalists, the region, namely, of the small lakes to the west of Lake Superior, where the Mississippi takes its rise, and also of that lying between this great basin of fresh water and the southern arm of Hudson Bay. I would employ the autumn in exploring the great valley of the Mississippi, and would pass the winter on the borders of the Gulf of Mexico.
To carry out such projects, however, I have need of larger resources than I can create by my own efforts, and I shall soon be at the end of the subsidy granted me by the King of Prussia. I shall, however, subordinate all these projects to the possibilities of which you kindly tell me. Notwithstanding the interest offered by the exploration of a country so rich as this, notwithstanding the gratifying welcome I have received here, I feel, after all, that nowhere can one work better than in our old Europe, and the friendship you have shown me is a more than sufficient motive, impelling me to return as soon as possible to Paris. Remember me to our common friends. I have made some sufficiently interesting collections which I shall forward to the Museum; they will show you that I have done my best to fulfill my promises, forgetting no one. . .
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:—
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.)
Although so deeply interested by the geological features of the country, Agassiz was nevertheless drawn even more strongly to the study of the marine animals for which his position on the sea-coast gave him such opportunities as he had never before had. The next letter shows how fully his time was occupied, and how fascinating this new field of observation was to him. The English is still a little foreign. He was not yet quite at home in the language which he afterward wrote and spoke with such fluency.
EAST BOSTON, September, 1847.
. . .What have you thought of me all this time, not having written a single line neither to you nor to Professor Silliman after the kind reception I have met with by your whole family? Pray excuse me and consider, if you please, the difficulty under which I labor, having every day to look after hundreds of new things which always carry me beyond usual hours of working, when I am then so much tired that I can think of nothing. Nevertheless, it is a delightful life to be allowed to examine in a fresh state so many things of which I had but an imperfect knowledge from books. The Boston market supplies me with more than I can examine.
Since I had the pleasure of seeing you I have been very successful in collecting specimens, especially in New York and Albany. In Washington I have been delighted to see the collections of the Exploring Expedition. They entitle you to the highest thanks from all scientific naturalists, and I hope it will be also felt in the same manner by your countrymen at large. . .I long for the opportunity of studying your fossil shells. As soon as I have gone over my Lowell lectures I hope to be able to move. I shall only pack up what I have already collected; but I cannot yet tell you precisely the time.
I began studying your "Zoophytes," but it is so rich a book that I proceed slowly. For years I have not learned so much from a book as from yours. As I soon saw I would not be able to go through in a short time, I sent a short preliminary report to one of our most widely diffused papers, "Preussische Staats Zeitung," giving only the general impression of your work, and I shall send to Erichson a fuller scientific report after I have done with the whole volume.
As I happen to have a lithograph of the original specimen of the Homo deluvii testis of Scheuchzer, I will forward it to Professor Silliman with this letter. I expect you will find it the counterpart of the specimen in your museum; or very nearly in the same state of preservation.
Having just lately received my books, I also inclose a pamphlet from Ehrenberg, which he desired me to leave with you, and also the books Professor Silliman has had the kindness to lend me. . . I have made many observations which I wish to publish, but I can find no time to write them for you now. I must wait till the weather is so dull as to bring nothing into the hands of gunners and fishermen. . .
So closed his first year in America. The second unfolded events both in the home he had left and in the one to which he had unconsciously come, which were to shape his future career, and exert the most powerful influence upon his whole life.
Excursions on Coast Survey Steamer.Relations with Dr. Bache, the Superintendent of the Coast Survey.Political Disturbances in Switzerland.Change of Relations with Prussia.Scientific School established in Cambridge.Chair of Natural History offered to Agassiz.Acceptance.Removal to Cambridge.Literary and Scientific Associations there and in Boston.Household in Cambridge.Beginning of Museum.Journey to Lake Superior."Report, with Narration.""Principles of Zoology," by Agassiz and Gould.Letters from European Friends respecting these Publications.Letter from Hugh Miller.Second Marriage.Arrival of his Children in America.
One of Agassiz's great pleasures in the summer of 1847 consisted in excursions on board the Coast Survey steamer Bibb, then employed in the survey of the harbor and bay of Boston, under command of Captain (afterward Admiral) Charles Henry Davis. Under no more kindly auspices could Agassiz's relations with this department of government work have been begun. "My cabin," writes Captain Davis, after their first trip together, "seems lonely without you."
Hitherto the sea-shore had been a closed book to the Swiss naturalist, and now it opened to him a field of research almost as stimulating as his own glaciers. Born and bred among the mountains, he knew marine animals only as they can be known in dried and alcoholic specimens, or in a fossil state. From the Bibb he writes to a friend on shore: "I learn more here in a day than in months from books or dried specimens. Captain Davis is kindness itself. Everything I can wish for is at my disposal so far as it is possible."
Dr. Bache was at this time Superintendent of the Coast Survey, and he saw at once how the work of the naturalist might ally itself with the professional work of the Survey to the greater usefulness of both. From the beginning to the end of his American life, therefore, the hospitalities of the United States Coast Survey were open to Agassiz. As a guest on board her vessels he studied the reefs of Florida and the Bahama Banks, as well as the formations of our New England shores. From the deck of the Bibb, in connection with Count de Pourtales, his first dredging experiments were undertaken; and his last long voyage around the continent, from Boston to San Francisco, was made on board the Hassler, a Coast Survey vessel fitted out for the Pacific shore. Here was another determining motive for his stay in this country. Under no other government, perhaps, could he have had opportunities so invaluable to a naturalist.
But events were now passing in Europe which made his former position there, as well as that of many of his old friends, wholly unstable. In February, 1848, the proclamation of the French republic broke upon Europe like a clap of thunder from a clear sky. The news created great disturbances in Switzerland, and especially in the canton of Neuchatel, where a military force was immediately organized by the republican party in opposition to the conservatives, who would fain have continued loyal to the Prussian king. For the moment all was chaos, and the prospects of institutions of learning were seriously endangered. The republican party carried the day; the canton of Neuchatel ceased to be a dependence of the Prussian monarchy, and became merged in the general confederation of Switzerland.
At about the same time that Agassiz, in consequence of this change of conditions, was honorably discharged from the service of the Prussian king, a scientific school was organized at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in direct connection with Harvard University. This school, known as the Lawrence Scientific School, owed its existence to the generosity of Abbott Lawrence, formerly United States Minister at the Court of St. James. He immediately offered the chair of Natural History (Zoology and Geology) to Agassiz, with a salary of fifteen hundred dollars, guaranteed by Mr. Lawrence himself, until such time as the fees of the students should be worth three thousand dollars to their professor. This time never came. Agassiz's lectures, with the exception of the more technical ones addressed to small classes, were always fully attended, but special students were naturally very few in a department of pure science, and their fees never raised the salary of the professor perceptibly. This was, however, counterbalanced in some degree by the clause in his contract which allowed him entire freedom for lectures elsewhere, so that he could supplement his restricted income from other sources.
In accordance with this new position Agassiz now removed his bachelor household to Cambridge, where he opened his first course in April, 1848. He could hardly have come to Harvard at a more auspicious moment, so far as his social and personal relations were concerned. The college was then on a smaller scale than now, but upon its list of professors were names which would have given distinction to any university. In letters, there were Longfellow and Lowell, and Felton, the genial Greek scholar, of whom Longfellow himself wrote, "In Attica thy birthplace should have been." In science, there were Peirce, the mathematician, and Dr. Asa Gray, then just installed at the Botanical Garden, and Jeffries Wyman, the comparative anatomist, appointed at about the same time with Agassiz himself. To these we might almost add, as influencing the scientific character of Harvard, Dr. Bache, the Superintendent of the Coast Survey, and Charles Henry Davis, the head of the Nautical Almanac, since the kindly presence of the former was constantly invoked as friend and counselor in the scientific departments, while the latter had his residence in Cambridge, and was as intimately associated with the interests of Harvard as if he had been officially connected with the university.
A more agreeable set of men, or one more united by personal relations and intellectual aims, it would have been difficult to find. In connection with these names, those of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, and Holmes also arise most naturally, for the literary men and scholars of Cambridge and Boston were closely united; and if Emerson, in his country home at Concord, was a little more withdrawn, his influence was powerful in the intellectual life of the whole community, and acquaintance readily grew to friendship between him and Agassiz. Such was the pleasant and cultivated circle into which Agassiz was welcomed in the two cities, which became almost equally his home, and where the friendships he made gradually transformed exile into household life and ties.
In Cambridge he soon took his share in giving as well as receiving hospitalities, and his Saturday evenings were not the less attractive because of the foreign character and somewhat unwonted combination of the household. Over its domestic comforts now presided an old Swiss clergyman, Monsieur Christinat. He had been attached to Agassiz from childhood, had taken the deepest interest in his whole career, and, as we have seen, had assisted him to complete his earlier studies. Now, under the disturbed condition of things at home, he had thrown in his lot with him in America. "If your old friend," he writes, "can live with his son Louis, it will be the height of his happiness." To Agassiz his presence in the house was a benediction. He looked after the expenses, and acted as commissary in chief to the colony. Obliged, as Agassiz was, frequently to be absent on lecturing tours, he could, with perfect security, intrust the charge of everything connected with the household to his old friend, from whom he was always sure of an affectionate welcome on his return. In short, so far as an old man could, "papa Christinat," as he was universally called in this miscellaneous family, strove to make good to him the absence of wife and children.
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.
BELGRAVE SQUARE, October 3, 1849.
. . .I thank you very sincerely for your most captivating general work on the "Principles of Zoology." I am quite in love with it. I was glad to find that you had arranged the nummulites with the tertiary rocks, so that the broad generalization I attempted in my last work on the Alps, Apennines, and Carpathians is completely sustained zoologically, and you will not be sorry to see the stratigraphical truth vindicated (versus E. de Beaumont and—). I beseech you to look at my memoir, and especially at my reasoning about the miocene and pliocene divisions of the Alps and Italy. It seems to me manifest that the percentage system derived from marine life can never be applied to tertiary TERRESTRIAL successions. . .
My friends have congratulated me much on this my last effort, and as Lyell and others most interested in opposing me have been forward in approval, I begin to hope that I am not yet quite done up; and that unlike the Bishop of Oviedo, my last sermon "ne sent pas de l'apoplexie." I have, nevertheless, been desperately out of sorts and full of gout and liver and all kinds of irritation this summer, which is the first for many a long year in which I have been unable to take the field. The meeting at Birmingham, however, revived me. Professor W. Rogers will have told you all about our doings. Buckland is up to his neck in "sewage," and wishes to change all underground London into a fossil cloaca of pseudo coprolites. This does not quite suit the chemists charged with sanitary responsibilities; for they fear the Dean will poison half the population in preparing his choice manures! But in this as in everything he undertakes there is a grand sweeping view.
When are we to meet again? And when are we to have a "stand-up fight" on the erratics of the Alps? You will see by the abstract of my memoir appended to my Alpine affair that I have taken the field against the extension of the Jura! In a word, I do not believe that great trunk glaciers ever filled the valleys of the Rhone, etc. Perhaps you will be present at our next meeting of the British Association at Edinburgh, August, 1850. Olim meminisse juvabit! and then, my dear and valued and most enlightened friend, we may study once more together the surface of my native rocks for "auld lang syne.". . .
DOWN, FARNBOROUGH, KENT, June 15 [1850, probably].
I have seldom been more deeply gratified than by receiving your most kind present of "Lake Superior." I had heard of it, and had much wished to read it, but I confess it was the very great honor of having in my possession a work with your autograph, as a presentation copy, that has given me such lively and sincere pleasure. I cordially thank you for it. I have begun to read it with uncommon interest, which I see will increase as I go on.
The Cirripedia, which you and Dr. Gould were so good as to send me, have proved of great service to me. The sessile species from Massachusetts consist of five species. . .Of the genus Balanus, on the shores of Britain, we have ONE species (B. perforata Bruguiere), which you have not in the United States, in the same way as you exclusively have B. eburneus. All the above species attain a somewhat larger average size on the shores of the United States than on those of Britain, but the specimens from the glacial beds of Uddevalla, Scotland, and Canada, are larger even than those of the United States.
Once again allow me to thank you with cordiality for the pleasure you have given me.
Believe me, with the highest respect, your truly obliged,
The following letter from Hugh Miller concerning Agassiz's intention of introducing "The Footprints of the Creator" to the American public by a slight memoir of Miller is of interest here. It is to be regretted that with this exception no letters have been found from him among Agassiz's papers, though he must have been in frequent correspondence with him, and they had, beside their scientific sympathy, a very cordial personal relation.
EDINBURGH, 2 STUART STREET, May 25, 1850.
I was out of town when your kind letter reached here, and found such an accumulation of employment on my return that it is only now I find myself able to devote half an hour to the work of reply, and to say how thoroughly sensible I am of the honor you propose doing me. It never once crossed my mind when, in writing my little volume, the "Footprints," I had such frequent occasion to refer to my master, our great authority in ichthyic history, that he himself would have associated his name with it on the other side of the Atlantic, and referred in turn to its humble writer.
In the accompanying parcel I send you two of my volumes, which you may not yet have seen, and in which you may find some materials for your proposed introductory memoir. At all events they may furnish you with amusement in a leisure hour. The bulkier of the two, "Scenes and Legends," of which a new edition has just appeared, and of which the first edition was published, after lying several years beside me, in 1835, is the earliest of my works to which I attached my name. It forms a sort of traditionary history of a district of Scotland, about two hundred miles distant from the capital, in which the character of the people has been scarce at all affected by the cosmopolitanism which has been gradually modifying and altering it in the larger towns; and as it has been frequently remarked,—I know not with what degree of truth,—that there is a closer resemblance between the Scotch and Swiss than between any other two peoples of Europe, you may have some interest in determining whether the features of your own country-folk are not sometimes to be seen in those of mine, as exhibited in my legendary history. Certainly both countries had for many ages nearly the same sort of work to do; both had to maintain a long and ultimately successful war of independence against nations greatly more powerful than themselves; and as their hills produced little else than the "soldier and his sword," both had to make a trade abroad of that art of war which they were compelled in self-defense to acquire at home. Even in the laws of some nations we find them curiously enough associated together. In France, under the old regime, the personal property of all strangers dying in the country, SWISS AND SCOTS EXCEPTED, was forfeited to the king.
The other volume, "First Impressions of England and its People," contains some personal anecdotes and some geology. But the necessary materials you will chiefly find in the article from the "North British Review" which I also inclose. It is from the pen of Sir David Brewster, with whom for the last ten years I have spent a few very agreeable days every year at Christmas, under the roof of a common friend,—one of the landed proprietors of Fifeshire. Sir David's estimate of the writer is, I fear, greatly too high, but his statement of facts regarding him is correct; and I think you will find it quite full enough for the purposes of a brief memoir. With his article I send you one of my own, written about six years ago for the same periodical, as the subject is one in which, from its connection with your master study,—the natural history of fishes,—you may take more interest than most men. It embodies, from observation, what may be regarded as THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FISHERMAN, and describes some curious scenes and appearances which I witnessed many years ago when engaged, during a truant boyhood, in prosecuting the herring fishery as an amateur. Many of my observations of natural phenomena date from this idle, and yet not wholly wasted, period of my life.
With the volumes I send also a few casts of my less fragile specimens of Asterolepis. Two of the number, those of the external and internal surfaces of the creature's cranial buckler, are really very curious combinations of plates, and when viewed in a slant light have a decidedly sculpturesque and not ungraceful effect. I have seen on our rustic tombstones worse representations of angels, winged and robed, than that formed by the central plates of the interior surface when the light is made to fall along their higher protuberances, leaving the hollows in the shade. You see how truly your prediction regarding the flatness of the creature's head is substantiated by these casts; it is really not easy to know how, placed on so flat a surface, the eyes could have been very available save for star-gazing; but as nature makes no mistakes in such matters, it is possible that the creature, like the flatfishes, may have lived much at the bottom, and that most of the seeing it had use for may have been seeing in an upward direction. None of my other specimens of bucklers are so entire and in so good a state of keeping as the two from which I have taken the casts, but they are greatly larger. One specimen, nearly complete, exhibits an area about four times as great as the largest of these two, and I have fragments of others which must have belonged to fish still more gigantic. The two other casts are of specimens of gill covers, which in the Asterolepis, as in the sturgeon, consisted each of a single plate. In both the exterior surface of the buckler and of the operculum the tubercles are a good deal enveloped in the stone, which is of a consistency too hard to be removed without injuring what it overlies; but you will find them in the smaller cast which accompanies the others, and which, as shown by the thickness of the plate in the original, indicates their size and form in a large individual, very characteristically shown. So coral-like is their aspect, that if it was from such a cast, not a fossil (which would, of course, exhibit the peculiarities of the bone), that Lamarck founded his genus Monticularia, I think his apology for the error might almost be maintained as good. I am sorry I cannot venture on taking casts from some of my other specimens; but they are exceedingly fragile, and as they are still without duplicates I am afraid to hazard them. Since publishing my little volume I have got several new plates of Asterolepis,—a broad palatal plate, covered with tubercles, considerably larger than those of the creature's external surface,—a key-stone shaped plate, placed, when in situ, in advance of the little plate between the eyes, which form the head and face of the effigy in the centre of the buckler,—and a side-plate, into which the condyloid processes of the lower jaw were articulated, and which exhibited the processes on which these hinged. There are besides some two or three plates more, whose places I have still to find. The small cast, stained yellow, is taken from an instructive specimen of the jaws of coccosteus, and exhibits a peculiarity which I had long suspected and referred to in the first edition of my volume on the Old Red Sandstone in rather incautious language, but which a set of my specimens now fully establishes. Each of the under jaws of the fish was furnished with two groups of teeth: one group in the place where, in quadrupeds, we usually find the molars; and another group in the line of the symphyses. And how these both could have acted is a problem which our anatomists here—many of whom have carefully examined my specimen—seem unable, and in some degree, indeed, afraid to solve.
I have written to the Messrs. Gould, Kendall & Lincoln to say that the third edition of the "Footprints" differs from the first and second only by the addition of a single note and an illustrative diagram, both of which I have inclosed to them in my communication. I anticipate much pleasure from the perusal of your work on Lake Superior, when it comes to hand, which, as your publishers have intrusted it to the care of a gentleman visiting this country, will, I think, be soon. It is not often that a region so remote and so little known as that which surrounds the great lake of America is visited by a naturalist of the first class. From such a terra incognita, at length unveiled to eyes so discerning, I anticipate strange tidings.
I am, my dear sir, with respect and admiration, very truly yours,
In the spring of 1850 Agassiz married Elizabeth Cabot Cary, daughter of Thomas Graves Cary, of Boston. This marriage confirmed his resolve to remain, at least for the present, in the United States. It connected him by the closest ties with a large family circle, of which he was henceforth a beloved and honored member, and made him the brother-in-law of one of his most intimate friends in Cambridge, Professor C.C. Felton. Thus secure of favorable conditions for the care and education of his children, he called them to this country. His son (then a lad of fifteen years of age) had joined him the previous summer. His daughters, younger by several years than their brother, arrived the following autumn, and home built itself up again around him.
The various foreign members of his household had already scattered. One or two had returned to Europe, others had settled here in permanent homes of their own. Among the latter were Professor Guyot and M. de Pourtales, who remained, both as scientific colleagues and personal friends, very near and dear to him all his life. "Papa Christinat" had also withdrawn. While Agassiz was absent on a lecturing tour, the kind old man, knowing well the opposition he should meet, and wishing to save both himself and his friend the pain of parting, stole away without warning and went to New Orleans, where he had obtained a place as pastor. This was a great disappointment to Agassiz, who had urged him to make his home with him, a plan in which his wife and children cordially concurred, but which did not approve itself to the judgment of his old friend. M. Christinat afterward returned to Switzerland, where he ended his days. He wrote constantly until his death, and was always kept advised of everything that passed in the family at Cambridge. Of the old household, Mr. Burkhardt alone remained a permanent member of the new one.
Proposition from Dr. Bache.Exploration of Florida Reefs.Letter to Humboldt concerning Work in America.Appointment to Professorship of Medical College in Charleston, S.C.Life at the South.Views concerning Races of Men.Prix Cuvier.
THE following letter from the Superintendent of the Coast Survey determined for Agassiz the chief events of the winter of 1851.
WEBB'S HILL, October 30, 1850.
Would it be possible for you to devote six weeks or two months to the examination of the Florida reefs and keys in connection with their survey? It is extremely important to ascertain what they are and how formed. One account treats them as growing corals, another as masses of something resembling oolite, piled together, barrier-wise. You see that this lies at the root of the progress of the reef, so important to navigation, of the use to be made of it in placing our signals, of the use as a foundation for light-houses, and of many other questions practically important and of high scientific interest. I would place a vessel at your disposal during the time you were on the reef, say six weeks.
The changes at or near Cape Florida, from the Atlantic coast and its siliceous sand, to the Florida coast and its coral sand, must be curious. You will be free to move from one end of the reef to the other, which will be, say one hundred and fifty miles. Motion to eastward would be slow in the windy season, though favored by the Gulf Stream as the winds are "trade." Whatever collections you might make would be your own. I would only ask for the survey such information and such specimens as would be valuable to its operations, especially to its hydrography, and some report on these matters. As this will, if your time and engagements permit, lead to a business arrangement, I must, though reluctantly, enter into that. I will put aside six hundred dollars for the two months, leaving you to pay your own expenses; or, if you prefer it, will pay all expenses of travel, including subsistence, to and from Key West, and furnish vessel and subsistence while there, and four hundred dollars.
What results would flow to science from your visit to that region! You have spoken of the advantage of using our vessels when they were engaged in their own work. Now I offer you a vessel the motions of which you will control, and the assistance of the officers and crew of which you will have. You shall be at no expense for going and coming, or while there, and shall choose your own time. . .
Agassiz accepted this proposal with delight, and at once made arrangements to take with him a draughtsman and an assistant, in order to give the expedition such a character as would make it useful to science in general, as well as to the special objects of the Coast Survey. It will be seen that Dr. Bache gladly concurred in all these views.
WASHINGTON, December 18, 1850.
On the basis of our former communications I have been, as the time served, raising a superstructure. I have arranged with Lieutenant Commander Alden to send the schooner W.A. Graham, belonging to the Coast Survey, under charge of an officer who will take an interest in promoting the great objects in which you will be engaged, to Key West, in time to meet you on your arrival in the Isabel of the 15th, from Charleston to Key West. The vessel will be placed at your absolute disposal for four to six weeks, as you may find desirable, doing just such things as you require, and going to such places as you direct. If you desire more than a general direction, I will give any specific ones which you may suggest. . .
I have requested that room be made in the cabin for you and for two aids, as you desire to take a draughtsman with you; and in reference to your enlarged plan of operating, of which I see the advantage, I have examined the financial question, and propose to add two hundred dollars to the six hundred in my letter of October 30th, to enable you to execute it. I would suggest that you stop a day in Washington on your way to Charleston, to pick up the topographical and geographical information which you desire, and to have all matters of a formal kind arranged to suit your convenience and wishes, which, I am sure, will all be promotive of the objects in view from your visit to Florida. . .You say I shall smile AT your plans,—instead of which, they have been smiled ON; now, there is a point for you,—a true Saxon distinction.
If you succeed (and did you ever fail!?) in developing for ourCoast Survey the nature, structure, growth, and all that, of theFlorida reefs, you will have conferred upon the country a pricelessfavor. . .
The Superintendent of the Coast Survey never had cause to regret the carte-blanche he had thus given. A few weeks, with the facilities so liberally afforded, gave Agassiz a clew to all the phenomena he had been commissioned to examine, and enabled him to explain the relation between the keys and the outer and inner reefs, and the mud swamps, or more open channels, dividing them, and to connect these again with the hummocks and everglades of the main-land. It remains to be seen whether his theory will hold good, that the whole or the greater part of the Florida peninsula has, like its southern portion, been built up of concentric reefs. But his explanation of the present reefs, their structure, laws of growth, relations to each other and to the main-land, as well as to the Gulf Stream and its prevailing currents, was of great practical service to the Coast Survey. It was especially valuable in determining how far the soil now building up from accumulations of mud and coral debris was likely to remain for a long time shifting and uncertain, and how far and in what localities it might be relied upon as affording a stable foundation. When, at the meeting of the American Association in the following spring, Agassiz gave an account of his late exploration, Dr. Bache, who was present, said that for the first time he understood the bearing of the whole subject, though he had so long been trying to unravel it.
The following letter was written immediately after Agassiz's return.
CAMBRIDGE, April 26, 1851.
. . .I have spent a large part of the winter in Florida, with a view of studying the coral reefs. I have found that they constitute a new class of reefs, distinct from those described by Darwin and Dana under the name of fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and atolls. I have lately read a paper upon that subject before the American Academy, which I shall send you as soon as it is printed. The case is this. There are several concentric reefs separated by deep channels; the peninsula of Florida itself is a succession of such reefs, the everglades being the filled-up channels, while the hummocks were formerly little intervening islands, like the mangrove islands in the present channels. But what is quite remarkable, all these concentric reefs are upon one level, above that of the sea, and there is no indication whatever of upheaval. You will find some observations upon upheavals, etc., in Silliman, by Tuomey; it is a great mistake, as I shall show. The Tortugas are a real atoll, but formed without the remotest indication of subsidence.
Of course this does not interfere in the least with the views of Darwin, for the whole ground presents peculiar features. I wish you would tell him something about this. One of the most remarkable peculiarities of the rocks in the reefs of the Tortugas consists in their composition; they are chiefly made up of CORALLINES, limestone algae, and, to a small extent only, of real corals. . .
Agassiz's report to the Coast Survey upon the results of this first investigation made by him upon the reefs of Florida was not published in full at the time. The parts practically most important to the Coast Survey were incorporated in their subsequent charts; the more general scientific results, as touching the physical history of the peninsula as a whole, appeared in various forms, were embodied in Agassiz's lectures, and were printed some years after in his volume entitled "Methods of Study." The original report, with all the plates prepared for it, was published in the "Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology," under the supervision of Alexander Agassiz, after the death of his father. It forms a quarto volume, containing some sixty pages of text, with twenty-two plates, illustrative of corals and coral structure, and a map of Southern Florida with its reefs and keys.
This expedition was also of great importance to Agassiz's collections, and to the embryo museum in Cambridge. It laid the foundation of a very complete collection of corals of all varieties and in all stages of growth. All the specimens, from huge coral heads and branching fans down to the most minute single corals, were given up to him, the value of the whole being greatly enhanced by the drawings taken on the spot from the living animals.
To this period belongs also the following fragment of a letter toHumboldt.
[Probably 1852,—date not given.]
. . .What a time has passed since my last letter! Had you not been constantly in my thoughts, and your counsels always before me as my guide, I should reproach myself for my silence. I hope my two papers on the medusae, forwarded this year, have reached you, and also one upon the classification of insects, as based upon their development. I have devoted myself especially to the organization of the invertebrate animals, and to the facts bearing upon the perfecting of their classification. I have succeeded in tracing the same identity of structure between the three classes of radiates, and also between those of mollusks, as has already been recognized in the vertebrates, and partially in the articulates. It is truly a pleasure for me now to be able to demonstrate in my lectures the insensible gradations existing between polyps, medusae, and echinoderms, and to designate by the same name organs seemingly so different. Especially has the minute examination of the thickness of the test in echinoderms revealed to me unexpected relations between the sea-urchin and the medusa. No one suspects, I fancy, at this moment, that the solid envelope of the Scutellae and the Clypeasters is traversed by a net-work of radiating tubes, corresponding to those of the medusae, so well presented by Ehrenberg in Aurelia aurita. If the Berlin zoologists will take the trouble to file off the surface of the test of an Echinarachnius parma, they will find a circular canal as large and as continuous as that of the medusae. The aquiferous tubes specified above open into this canal. But the same thing may be found under various modifications in other genera of the family. Since I have succeeded in injecting colored liquid into the beroids, for instance, and keeping them alive with it circulating in their transparent mass, I am able to show the identity of their zones of locomotive fringes (combs), from which they take their name of Ctenophorae, with the ambulacral (locomotive) apparatus of the echinoderms. Furnished with these facts, it is not difficult to recognize true beroidal forms in the embryos of sea-urchins and star-fishes, published by Muller in his beautiful plates, and thus to trace the medusoid origin of the echinoderms, as the polypoid origin of the medusae has already been recognized. I do not here allude to their primitive origin, but simply to the general fact that among radiates the embryos of the higher classes represent, in miniature, types of the lower classes, as, for instance, those of the echinoderms resemble the medusae, those of the medusae the polyps. Having passed the greater part of last winter in Florida, where I was especially occupied in studying the coral reefs, I had the best opportunity in the world for prosecuting my embryological researches upon the stony corals. I detected relations among them which now enable me to determine the classification of these animals according to their mode of development with greater completeness than ever before, and even to assign a superior or inferior rank to their different types, agreeing with their geological succession, as I have already done for the fishes. I am on the road to the same results for the mollusks and the articulates, and can even now say in general terms, that the most ancient representatives of all the families belonging to these great groups, strikingly recall the first phases in the embryonic development of their successors in more recent formations, and even that the embryos of comparatively recent families recall families belonging to ancient epochs. You will find some allusion to these results in my Lectures on Embryology, given in my "Lake Superior," of which I have twice sent you a copy, that it might reach you the more surely; but these first impressions have assumed greater coherence now, and I constantly find myself recurring to my fossils for light upon the embryonic forms I am studying and vice versa, consulting my embryological drawings in order to decipher the fossils with greater certainty.
The proximity of the sea and the ease with which I can visit any part of the coast within a range of some twenty degrees give me inexhaustible resources for the whole year, which, as time goes on, I turn more and more to the best account. On the other hand, the abundance and admirable state of preservation of the fossils found in our ancient deposits, as well as the regular succession of the beds containing them, contribute admirable material for this kind of comparative study. . .
In the summer of 1851 Agassiz was invited to a professorship at the Medical College in Charleston, S.C. This was especially acceptable to him, because it substituted a regular course of instruction to students, for the disconnected lectures given to miscellaneous audiences, in various parts of the country, by which he was obliged to eke out his small salary and provide for his scientific expenses. While more fatiguing than class-room work, these scattered lectures had a less educational value, though, on the other hand, they awakened a very wide-spread interest in the study of nature. The strain of constant traveling for this purpose, the more harassing because so unfavorable to his habits of continuous work, had already told severely upon his health; and from this point of view also the new professorship was attractive, as promising a more quiet, though no less occupied, life. The lectures were to be given during the three winter months, thus occupying the interval between his autumn and spring courses at Cambridge.
He assumed his new duties at Charleston in December, 1851, and by the kindness of his friend Mrs. Rutledge, who offered him the use of her cottage for the purpose, he soon established a laboratory on Sullivan's Island, where the two or three assistants he had brought with him could work conveniently. The cottage stood within hearing of the wash of the waves, at the head of the long, hard sand beach which fringed the island shore for some three or four miles. There could hardly be a more favorable position for a naturalist, and there, in the midst of their specimens, Agassiz and his band of workers might constantly be found. His studies here were of the greater interest to him because they connected themselves with his previous researches, not only upon the fishes, but also upon the lower marine animals of the coast of New England and of the Florida reefs; so that he had now a basis for comparison of the fauna scattered along the whole Atlantic coast of the United States. The following letter gives some idea of his work at this time.
CHARLESTON, January 26, 1852.
You should at least know that I think of you often on these shores. And how could I do otherwise when I daily find new small crustacea, which remind me of the important work you are now preparing on that subject.
Of course, of the larger ones there is nothing to be found after Professor Gibbes has gone over the ground, but among the lower orders there are a great many in store for a microscopic observer. I have only to regret that I cannot apply myself more steadily. I find my nervous system so over-excited that any continuous exertion makes me feverish. So I go about as much as the weather allows, and gather materials for better times.
Several interesting medusae have been already observed; among others, the entire metamorphosis and alternate generation of a new species of my genus tiaropsis. You will be pleased to know that here, as well as at the North, tiaropsis is the medusa of a campanularia. Mr. Clark, one of my assistants, has made very good drawings of all its stages of growth, and of various other hydroid medusae peculiar to this coast. Mr. Stimpson, another very promising young naturalist, who has been connected with me for some time in the same capacity, draws the crustacea and bryozoa, of which there are also a good many new ones here. My son and my old friend Burkhardt are also with me (upon Sullivan's Island), and they look after the larger species, so that I shall probably have greatly increased my information upon the fauna of the Atlantic coast by the time I return to Cambridge.
In town, where I go three times a week to deliver lectures at the Medical College (beside a course just now in the evening also before a mixed audience), I have the rest of my family, so that nothing would be wanting to my happiness if my health were only better. . .What a pity that a man cannot work as much as he would like; or at least accomplish what he aims at. But no doubt it is best it should be so; there is no harm in being compelled by natural necessities to limit our ambition,—on the contrary, the better sides of our nature are thus not allowed to go to sleep. However, I cannot but regret that I am unable at this time to trace more extensively subjects for which I should have ample opportunities here, as for instance the anatomy of the echinoderms, and also the embryology of the lower animals in general. . .
This winter, notwithstanding the limitations imposed upon his work by the state of his health, was a very happy one to Agassiz. As mentioned in the above letter his wife and daughters had accompanied him to Charleston, and were established there in lodgings. Their holidays and occasional vacations were passed at the house of Dr. John E. Holbrook (the "Hollow Tree"), an exquisitely pretty and picturesque country place in the neighborhood of Charleston. Here Agassiz had been received almost as one of the family on his first visit to Charleston, shortly after his arrival in the United States. Dr. Holbrook's name, as the author of the "Herpetology of South Carolina," had long been familiar to him, and he now found a congenial and affectionate friend in the colleague and fellow-worker, whose personal acquaintance he had been anxious to make. Dr. Holbrook's wife, a direct descendant of John Rutledge of our revolutionary history, not only shared her husband's intellectual life, but had herself rare mental qualities, which had been developed by an unusually complete and efficient education. The wide and various range of her reading, the accuracy of her knowledge in matters of history and literature, and the charm of her conversation, made her a delightful companion. She exercised the most beneficent influence upon her large circle of young people, and without any effort to attract, she drew to herself whatever was most bright and clever in the society about her. The "Hollow Tree," presided over by its hospitable host and hostess was, therefore, the centre of a stimulating and cultivated social intercourse, free from all gene or formality. Here Agassiz and his family spent many happy days during their southern sojourn of 1852. The woods were yellow with jessamine, and the low, deep piazza was shut in by vines and roses; the open windows and the soft air full of sweet, out-of-door fragrance made one forget, spite of the wood fire on the hearth, that it was winter by the calendar. The days, passed almost wholly in the woods or on the veranda, closed with evenings spent not infrequently in discussions upon the scientific ideas and theories of the day, carried often beyond the region of demonstrated facts into that of speculative thought. An ever-recurring topic was that of the origin of the human race. It was Agassiz's declared belief that man had sprung not from a common stock, but from various centres, and that the original circumscription of these primordial groups of the human family corresponded in a large and general way with the distribution of animals and their combination into faunae. * (* See "Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and their Relation to the Different Types of Man" included in Nott & Gliddon's "Types of Mankind".) His special zoological studies were too engrossing to allow him to follow this line of investigation closely, but it was never absent from his view of the animal kingdom as a whole. He valued extremely Mrs. Holbrook's thoughtful sympathy, and as the following letter connects itself with the winter evening talks by the "Hollow Tree" fireside, and was suggested by them, it may be given here, though in date it is a little in advance of the present chapter.
CAMBRIDGE, July, 1852.
. . .I am again working at the human races, and have opened another line of investigation in that direction. The method followed by former investigators does not seem to me to have been altogether the best, since there is so little agreement between them. The difficulty has, no doubt, arisen on one side from the circumstance that the inquirer sought for evidence of the unity of all races, expecting the result to agree with the prevailing interpretation of Genesis; and on the other from too zoological a point of view in weighing the differences observed. Again, both have almost set aside all evidence not directly derived from the examination of the races themselves. It has occurred to me that as a preliminary inquiry we ought to consider the propriety of applying to man the same rules as to animals, examining the limits within which they obtain, and paying due attention to all circumstances bearing upon the differences observed among men, from whatever quarter in the study of nature they may be gathered. What do the monkeys say to this? or, rather, what have they to tell in reference to it? There are among them as great, and, indeed, even greater, differences than among men, for they are acknowledged to constitute different genera, and are referred to many, indeed to more than a hundred, species; but they are the nearest approach to the human family, and we may at least derive some hints from them. How much mixture there is among these species, if any, is not at all ascertained; indeed, we have not the least information respecting their intercourse; but one point is certain,—zoologists agree as little among themselves respecting the limits of these species as they do respecting the affinities of the races of men. What some consider as distinct species, others consider as mere varieties, and these varieties or species differ in particulars neither more constant nor more important than those which distinguish the human races. The fact that they are arranged in different genera, species, and varieties does not lessen the value of the comparison; for the point in question is just to know whether nations, races, and what have also been called families of men, such as the Indo-Germanic, the Semitic, etc., do not in reality correspond to the families, genera, and species of monkeys. Now the first great subdivisions among the true monkeys (excluding Makis and Arctopitheci) are founded upon the form of the nose, those of the new world having a broad partition between the nostrils, while those of the old world have it narrow. How curious that this fact, which has been known to naturalists for half a century, as presenting a leading feature among monkeys, should have been overlooked in man, when, in reality, the negroes and Australians differ in precisely the same manner from the other races; they having a broad partition, and nostrils opening sideways, like the monkeys of South America, while the other types of the human family have a narrow partition and nostrils opening downward, like the monkeys of Asia and Africa. Again, the minor differences, such as the obliquity of the anterior teeth, the thickness of the lips, the projection of the cheek-bones, the position of the eyes, the characteristic hair, or wool, afford as constant differences as those by which the chimpanzees, orangs, and gibbons are separated into distinct genera; and their respective species differ no more than do the Greeks, Germans, and Arabs,—or the Chinese, Tartars, and Finns, —or the New Zealanders and Malays, which are respectively referred to the same race. The truth is, that the different SPECIES admitted by some among the orangs are in reality RACES among monkeys, or else the races among men are nothing more than what are called species among certain monkeys. . .Listen for a moment to the following facts, and when you read this place a map of the world before you. Upon a narrow strip of land along the Gulf of Guinea, from Cape Palmas to the Gaboon, live two so-called species of chimpanzee; upon the islands of Sumatra and Borneo live three or four orangs; upon the shores of the Gulf of Bengal, including the neighborhood of Calcutta, Burmah, Malacca, Sumatra, Borneo, and Java together, ten or eleven species of gibbons, all of which are the nearest relatives to the human family, some being as large as certain races of men; altogether, fifteen species of anthropoid monkeys playing their part in the animal population of the world upon an area not equaling by any means the surface of Europe. Some of these species are limited to Borneo, others to Sumatra, others to Java alone, others to the peninsula of Malacca; that is to say to tracts of land similar in extent to Spain, France, Italy, and even to Ireland; distinct animals, considered by most naturalists as distinct species, approaching man most closely in structural eminence and size, limited to areas not larger than Spain or Italy. Why, then, should not the primitive theatre of a nation of men have been circumscribed within similar boundaries, and from the beginning have been as independent as the chimpanzee of Guinea, or the orangs of Borneo and Sumatra? Of course, the superior powers of man have enabled him to undertake migrations, but how limited are these, and how slight the traces they have left behind them. . . Unfortunately for natural history, history so-called has recorded more faithfully the doings of handfuls of adventurers than the real history of the primitive nations with whom the migrating tribes came into contact. But I hope it will yet be possible to dive under these waves of migration, to remove, as it were, the trace of their passage, and to read the true history of the past inhabitants of the different parts of the world, when it will be found, if all analogies are not deceptive, that every country equaling in extent those within the limits of which distinct nationalities are known to have played their part in history, has had its distinct aborigines, the character of which it is now the duty of naturalists to restore, if it be not too late, in the same manner as paleontologists restore fossil remains. I have already made some attempts, by studying ancient geography, and I hope the task may yet be accomplished. . .Look, for instance, at Spain. The Iberians are known as the first inhabitants, never extending much beyond the Pyrenees to the Garonne, and along the gulfs of Lyons and Genoa. As early as during the period of Phoenician prosperity they raised wool from their native sheep, derived from the Mouflon, still found wild in Spain, Corsica, and Sardinia; they had a peculiar breed of horses, to this day differing from all other horses in the world. Is this not better evidence of their independent origin, than is the fancied lineage with the Indo-Germanic family of their Oriental descent? For we must not forget, in connection with this, that the Basque language was once the language of all Spain, that which the Iberian spoke, and which has no direct relation to Sanskrit.