LOUIS AGASSIZ. 1896. ^ fc9\wcrf r '-'^ MCZ LIBRARY HARVARD UI^ilVERSITY CAMBRIDGE. MA USA LOUIS AGASSIZ, TT would be unnatural to -^ of as this have such an assemblage meet in the Museum and Faculty Room this University and yet have no public word spoken in honor of a name which must be silently present to the minds of our all visitors. At some near future day, it is to be hoped, some one of you who is well acquainted with Agassiz's here concerning scientific career will discourse I could not now, even that of which than I. On you have and is far the more intimate knowledge for in the more — would, speak to you of this social occasion it has what Agassi z stood influence I if it, fitting to that agreeable task I way seemed that of character and thing to commemorate, have been called. He made an impression that was unrivalled. He left the Agassiz legend, as a sort of popular myth in the air about us behind him one might say and life comes kindlier to all of us, we get more recognition from the world, because we call our- — — selves naturalists, he also belonged. — and that was the class to which The secret of such an e&ctive extraordinarily influence lay in the equally extraordinary mixture and of the animal social gifts, the intellectual and the desires and passions boyhood, he looked on the world as made for each other, living things as to take mental of collecting life if if it his and he were and on the vast diversity he were there them possession of all. of authority w^ith His habit began in childhood, and during knew no bounds powers, From man. of the his long save those that separate the things of Nature from those of human in his student years, in spite of the Already art. most stringent poverty, his whole scheme of existence was that of one predestined to greatness, who takes that fact for granted, and stands forth immediately as a scientific leader of men. His passion for knowing living things was combined with a rapidity of observation, and a capacity them again and remember everything about them, w^hich all his life it seemed an easy triumph and delight for him to exercise, and which never allowed him to waste a moment in doubts to recognize about the commensurability of his powers with his tasks. When If a ever a person lived by faith, boy hundred and artist of twenty, with fifty dollars he did. an allowance of two a year, he maintained an attached to his employ, a custom which never afterwards was departed from, maintained two or three. very outset to all those He — except when he lectured from the who would hear him. '^1 feel within tion/' myself the strength of a whole genera- he wrote to his father at that time, and launched himself upon the publication of " Poissons ter Fossiles " his costly with no clear vision of the quar- from whence the payment might be expected to come. At Neuchatel (where between five the ages of twenty- and thirty he enjoyed a stipend that varied from four hundred to six hundred dollars) he organ- academy of natural history, with its museum, managing by one expedient or another to employ artists, secretaries, and assistants, and to keep a lithographic and printing establishment of his own employed with the work that he put forth. ized a regular and Fishes, fossil and living, echinoderms transfigured thirty he tion, themselves under hand, and at his was already at the zenith recognized by all glaciers, of his reputa- as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense, one of those folio copies of mankind, nothing of like less Linngeus and who aim at than an acquaintance with the whole His genius for classifying was animated Nature. simply marvellous says, Cuvier, ; and, as nowhere had a his latest single person biographer ever given so decisive an impulse to natural history. Such was the human being who on an October morning fifty years ago disembarked at our port, bringing his hungry heart along with him, his confidence in his destiny, and his imagination full of plans. The only particular resource he was assured 6 of was one course general resource of lie But Lowell Lectures. one of always was assured, having whose presence he could scribe his aims. find His belief to fail, al- — and ways counted on it and never found that was the good will of every fellow-creature it in an opportunity to de- in these was so intense and unqualified that he could not conceive of others not feeling the furtherance of them to be a duty binding upon also Seneca says with a man, : tlieni. — Strength it Vdle non can't be taught. discitai\ as must be born of desire And Agassiz came one with such enthusiasm glowing in his before countenance, — such a persuasion radiating from his person that his projects w^ere the sole things really fit to interest irresistible. man as man, He came, in — that he was absolutely Byron's words, with vic- tory beaming from his breast, and every one went down time, before him, some yielding him money, some some specimens, and some labor, but all con- tributing their applause and their godspeed. so, livino; And amono; us from month to month and from year to year, with no relation to prudence except his pertinacious violation of all her usual laws, on the whole achieved the compass studied the geology and fauna of he of his desires, a continent, trained a generation of zoologists, founded one of the chief museums of the world, to scientific education in gave a new impulse America, and died the idol of the public, as well as of his circle of pupils and friends. immediate The ideals secret of it all was, that while his scientific were an integral part of his being, something that he never forgot or laid aside, so that wherever he went he came forward as " the Professor/' and talked or ''^ shop " to every person, young or whom learned or unlearned, with little, old, great he was thrown, he was at the same time so commanding a presence, so curious and expansive, and self and " Here a man on rice and no musty savant, but a man, a great man, the heroic scale, not to serve He sin." what a student Franklin, generous and reckless of him- own, that every one said immediately, of his is so and inquiring, so responsive of is ava- elevated the popular notion of Nature could Since Benjamin be. we had never had among more popularly impressive for students to whom come to him ; us a person of He type. did not wait he made inquiry for promising youthful collectors, and when he heard of him to come. the American nat- one, he wrote, inviting and urging Thus- there is uralists of my hardlj^ Nay, more train. one now of generation ; whom Agassiz did not he said to every one that a year or two of natural history, studied as he understood would give the best training for any kind of it, mental Sometimes he was amusingly naif in this regard, as when he offered to put his whole Museum at work. the disposition of the Emperor but come and labor there. how of Brazil And if I well he would remember certain officials of the Brazilian empire smiled at the cordiality with which he pressed upon them a 8 similar invitation. But it had a great effect. Natural history must indeed be a godlike pursuit, if man such a as this can so adore it, and the very definition and meaning people said of underwent a favorable alteration naturalist ; the Avord in the common mind. Certain sayings of Agassiz's, as the famous one that he " had no time for habit naming of making money," and his occupation his simply as that of " teacher," have caught the public fancy, and are permanent benefactions. sideration for the fact AVe all enjoy more con- that he manifested himself here thus before us in his day. He was that looks forward and not backward, and wastes a had a splendid example of the temperament moment never in regrets for the irrevocable. I the privilege of admission to his society during remember our hammocks in the the Thayer expedition to Brazil. at night, as w^e all fairy-like swung in I w^ell moonlight, on the deck of the steamer that Amazon between the forests o'uardino; the stream on either side, how he turned and whispered, "James, are you awake?" and continued, / cannot sleep I am too happy I keep thinking of these glorious plans." The plans contemplated following the Amazon to its head-waters, and penetrating the Andes in Peru. And yet, w^hen throbbed its way up ^' the ; ; he arrived at the Peruvian frontier and learned that that country had broken letters to officials would be into revolution, that his useless, and that that part 9 of the project indeed bitterly hour, when must be given up, although he was chagrined and excited for part of an the hour had passed over seemed it as if he had quite forgotten the disappointment, so enthusiastically was he occupied already with the new scheme substituted by his active mind. Agassiz's influence on methods of teaching community was prompt and The good excess. is old way of it will not tell its very by There and not let now in room book or word him out till he had discovered found the truths after weeks and months -, to full of turtle shells, or the truths which the objects contained. sorrow New you how Agassiz used lobster shells, or oyster shells, without a all more encountered at his hands. lock a student up in a to help him, the have received to probably no public school teacher England who all committing printed memory seems never such a shock as — people's imagination so that it struck abstractions to decisive, in our others never found them. them were already made Some of lonely Those who found into naturalists thereby — the failures were blotted from the book of honor and of life. '' your own hands Go ; to look, Nature ; take the facts into and see for yourself ! — these were the maxims which Agassiz preached wherever he went, and their effect on pedagogy was electric. The extreme rigor of his devotion to this concrete method of learning was the natural consequence of his own peculiar type of intellect, in which the capacity for abstraction and causal reasoning and 10 tracing chains of consequences from hypotheses so much was developed than the genius for acquaint- less ance with vast volumes of and for seizing upon detail, more proximate and While on the Thayer expedition, I concrete kind. remember that I often put questions to him about analogies and relations of the the facts of our new doubt tropical habitat, but I if he ever answered one of these questions of mine He outright. always said have a definite problem " There, you go and look and : More than once have him quote with deep feeling the Grau, tlieurer Freiuid, Unci grim The the only man he man who cles lines ist alle and ; I really loved heard from Faust: Theorie, and had use for was To could bring him facts. life see facts, meant for think he often positively loathed the ratiocinating type of mind. toialhj I Lebens goldner Baiim." not to argue or raisonnircu, was what him find the and would-be abstractionists all biological philosophers. '' you see His severity in this line was answer for yourself." a living rebuke to : uneducated ! " I '• Mr. Blank, you are heard him once say to a who propounded to him some glittering And on a similar occasion theoretic generality. student he gave an admonition that must have sunk deep into the him heart of to whom " Mr. X., some people perhaps bright if young man ; now but when you are they ever speak of you then, will be this: ^ That it X., — was addressed. consider fifty a years old, what they oh, yes, I you will say know him; he 11 used to be a very bright young man!'" is the conceited youth who Happy proper moment at the receives such salutary cold water therapeutics as this from one who, We cannot all in other respects, is a kind friend. escape from being abstractionists. I myself, for instance, have never been able to escape but the hours difference I spent with Agassiz so taught between livers in the light of the world's concrete that I have never been able to forget of mind have me it. the and all possible abstractionists ; all fulness, Both kinds their place in the infinite design, but there can be no question as to which kind lies the nearer to the divine type of thinking. view Agassiz' s of Nature was saturated with simple religious feeling, and for this deep but un- conventional religiosity he found at most sympathetic possible environment. years that have knowledge of sped since Harvard the In the fifty he arrived here our Nature has penetrated into joints and recesses which his vision never pierced. elements and not the totals are what most passionately concerned to The causal we are now understand ; and naked and poverty-stricken enough do the strippedout elements and forces occasionally appear to us But the truth of things is after all their living fulness, and some day, from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in to be. Agassiz's generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of round again all our analytic investigations, will get to that higher and simpler way of look- 44 072 175 516 12 ing at Nature. Meanwhile Agassiz, there floats ing, that as we look back upon up a breath as of life's morn- makes the world seem young and fresh once more. May and especially may those who never a grateful thought to his memory throuo-h that Museum which he younger members knew him, give as we wander w^e all, of our association founded, and through this University whose ideals he did so much to elevate and define.
