“‘That is right,’ said he; ‘a pencil is one of the best eyes. I am glad to notice, too, that you keep your specimen wet and your bottle corked.’
“With these encouraging words, he added:–
“‘Well, what is it like?’
“He listened attentively to my brief rehearsal of the structure of parts whose names were still unknown to me.… When I had finished, he waited as if expecting more, and then, with an air of disappointment, ‘You have not looked very carefully; why,’ he continued most earnestly, ‘you haven’t even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the fish itself. Look again! Look again!’ and he left me to my misery.
“I was piqued; I was mortified. Still more of that wretched fish! But now I set myself to my task with a will, and discovered one new thing after another, until I saw how just the professor’s criticism had been. The afternoon passed quickly, and when, toward its close, the professor inquired,–
“‘Do you see it yet?’
“‘No.’ I replied, ‘I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before.’
“‘That is next best,’ said he earnestly; ‘but I won’t hear you now; put away your fish and go home; perhaps you will be ready with a better answer in the morning. I will examine you before you look at the fish.’
“This was disconcerting. Not only must I think of my fish all night, studying, without the object before me, what this unknown but most visible feature might be, but also, without reviewing my new discoveries, I must give an exact account of them the next day. I had a bad memory, so I walked home by Charles River in a disturbed state with my two perplexities.
“The cordial greeting from the professor the next morning was reassuring. Here was a man who seemed to be quite as anxious as I that I should see for myself what he saw.
“‘Do you perhaps mean,’ I asked, ‘that the fish has symmetrical sides with paired organs?’
“His thoroughly pleased ‘Of course, of course!’ repaid the wakeful hours of the previous night. After he had discoursed most happily and enthusiastically as he always did upon the importance of this point, I ventured to ask what I should do next.
“‘Oh, look at your fish!’ he said, and left me again to my own devices. In a little more than an hour he returned and heard my new catalogue.
“‘That is good, that is good,’ he repeated; ‘but that is not all; go on.’ And so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else or to use any artificial aid. ‘Look! Look! Look!’ was his repeated injunction.
“This was the best entomological lesson I ever had, a lesson whose influence has extended to the details of every subsequent study; a legacy that professor has left to me, as he left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part.”
For eight months the lad studied fish, and at the end of the time he declared, “What I had gained by this outside experience has been of greater value than years of later investigation in my favorite group.”
A great teacher had come his way, and Samuel Scudder knew it.
If modern youth finds it hard to understand why young Samuel Scudder found this method of learning unusual, it is because Agassiz sent on down the line teachers who recognized its value and made it their own. If we are not delivered over to dull textbooks today for our science we have Agassiz to thank.
By this time young Alexander had had his fling with the Coast Survey, discovered that it by no means led to wealth, and that marriage was as far off as ever. He resigned, and came back to his father’s museum where straightway a post was made for him. On his salary of fifteen hundred dollars he was now ready to marry Anna, and since the salary even then seemed insufficient to cover a home of their own, the young pair moved into the Quincy Street house which was, after all, the only real home that the boy had known. Alexander was business head of the museum which sorely needed one, and he had charge of the department which interested him most, the radiates. His work was certainly cut out for him, for now Louis with a practical son to manage for him, drove ahead with his light-hearted method of spending money which he had not yet got his hands on. It was hard on Alexander, but a great relief to Louis.
The war came on and took away assistants and students, some of whom collected shells and fossils under the enemy’s nose. Money was harder than ever to get, men to work on the museum more difficult to find. Yet the building grew, and the collections grew, and the influence of a great teacher grew, as inevitable things will. Disappointments, set-backs, disagreements, growing weariness with an overworked body, wore Agassiz down but did not stop him. When Emerson remarked that natural history was getting too great an ascendency at Harvard, Louis advised him not to check the science but to stimulate the other departments, and Emerson said, “Tut, tut, I meant mathematics.”
The other departments did well to keep an eye on the zoology department over there in the swamp. It was getting a good deal of attention, by and large. What with a legislature quarreling over it and astonishingly delivering large sums of money to it; what with students coming from all over the earth because Harvard housed a genius; what with this man, Agassiz, rushing around with his unacademic vitality and upholding revolutionary ideas, like an elective system where boys could take his course if they wanted to, and an Academic Council where he could talk all common sense out of the faculty; what with all these disturbing factors, the other departments had to wake up. And it was all to the good of Harvard if it intended to be a great university.
19. NOTHING LEFT UNDONE
Now there were a few other things besides building a museum which Louis Agassiz meant to do while there yet was time. Quite a bit of the world remained to be explored, and he had always had it in mind to see as much of it as possible before he had to leave it. He was the kind of man who could easily have used two lives and given good account of them both. He had but one, and not so much left of it, but he intended no waste of what remained.
He was tired, too tired. He had no patience with weariness. Though the school for girls had been given up, he still felt enough anxiety for the prosperity of his museum to go on another lecture tour. He came back, more tired, and ready for once to plan a vacation for himself. “We will take a trip together down to Brazil,” he told Elizabeth. “And will that be a vacation?” she might have asked. It would have been a question to the point.
For Agassiz had not picked out South America as a health resort. Nearly forty years ago, he had taken over the collection of a dead man, Spix, and worked out from it his first scientific treatise. Now he would like to see for himself what Brazilian fishes were like. For years he and the Emperor of Brazil had been writing to each other until each had a great respect for the other. He knew the Emperor would be glad to see him. Elizabeth considered and agreed.
Now came about one of those extraordinary arrangements which never seemed to have much to do with any personal effort of Agassiz, the kind of thing which had happened to him all his life from his boyhood when the rich man wished to adopt him, and when Papa Christinat dropped into his hands the fare to Paris. He met his friend Nathaniel Thayer in town one day and they talked of his trip. Purely for pleasure? But certainly! Ah, think of your Museum, and what it could do with collections. True, true, we do need South American collections. Then, proposed Mr. Thayer, if it would not interfere with your health, why not let me furnish enough money for half a dozen assistants and see what they can do for us under your supervision? Done! said Agassiz, and went home to tell Elizabeth who probably never expected a trip by themselves.
Money unlimited, leisure for what he wanted most to do, returned health, and a wife who would relieve him of every care and keep his records for him, what more could a man want? Nor was Elizabeth less fortunate. For where else in the whole world would she want to be, and how else could she make her man so contented? No one knew better than Elizabeth how restless he would have become on an idle holida
y.
So they started, with six assistants and some lucky Harvard boys who could afford to pay their own expenses for the sake of the trip. Alexander had to stay at home, for someone responsible must be left in charge of Museum affairs. Alex liked to travel, too. Off on the fine steamer, Colorado, on which the Pacific Mail had offered them free passage, a good sum which Agassiz saved for specimens at the outset. In his pocket an unsolicited letter from the Secretary of the Navy to the officers of all war vessels asking their help in everything Agassiz wanted. No wonder, as he wrote his mother, “I seem like a spoiled child of the country,” and he prays that he may have the strength to repay them. But Louis Agassiz owed America nothing!
It was such a voyage as most men would feel sufficient reward for a lifetime of work. The Emperor was a man of parts, one whose enlightened character, Charles Sumner wrote Agassiz, was one of the happy accidents of government. Agassiz was all that he expected, and more. He placed at his disposal a war steamer and an excellent scientist for a guide. “I have not been able to spend a dollar,” writes Agassiz to Sumner, “except for my personal comfort, and for my collections,” No wonder he bought duplicates of everything and crowded the deck of his steamer so that it never looked less like a warship.
For nearly sixteen months Agassiz explored and collected to his very heart’s content. More of his dreams come true! For nearly a year the little warship sailed on as peaceful a jaunt as it was ever to know. Through the jungled banks of the Amazon, stopping in the river while the men rowed up the water paths which disappeared into the dark forest, on and on until the great river had delivered over her secrets with never a shot fired. Even the Indians were friendly, and would row the men in their montarias along the green tunnels to their lodges where the explorers stayed for days while the warship waited. Wherever they stopped, they worked, collecting, recording, losing not a moment; and having such a good time that nobody ever forgot the experience.
Yet not exactly the kind of trip which most men would regard as a vacation. Two of the assistants, the ornithologist and the conchologist, had to go home after a short time to recover from its effects. The artist worked on with Agassiz and returned to America so ill that he died in a few months. Yet Agassiz, nearing sixty, worked and traveled indefatigably, admitting only for a few days that he was too tired to write letters. And this was a trip for his health!
Another member of the expedition whose endurance was unshaken by strange events was William James. He explored with the best of them, and brought back psychological and biological ideas enough to last him for some time. One biographer of Agassiz declares that James so developed his power of observation on the trip that he was later made a professor of philosophy at Harvard. It is quite likely that he needed all the powers of observation he had to bring him back to Harvard at all.
The Amazon River and the Amazon valley made the kind of huge setting for exploration which exactly suited the temperament of Louis Agassiz. He divided his men up into groups, stationing them at wide distances to get the range of species through their simultaneous collections. He collected everything from palm trees to insects until the deck of his ship was a piece of the jungle. He found the basin of the Amazon a fresh water ocean with an archipelago of islands, and characteristic oceanic fauna. We must, he said, find out about the distribution of species before we can decide the question of their origin; and as far as the Amazon was concerned, he attended to the matter of distribution very thoroughly.
Then through the rainy season when the roads were rivers of mud, he slipped and slid and scrambled up and down the mountains in the interior looking for traces of ancient glaciers. For a horse he had no liking and no one had ever persuaded him to ride one. But now for his glaciers he mounted horseback, and walking as much of the way as he could, saw the moraines and vowed never to mount a horse again. Well out of it, he wrote his mother a letter of rapture: “I have found traces of glaciers under this burning sky. Imagine if you can, floating ice under the equator…” He had imagined, and he saw the earth roll past him frozen to its core. It is not given to many men to realize a world swinging through æons of slow change, and to apprehend the structure of the smallest creature on it!
It was a profitable trip for Agassiz and for science. In his first published book of 1828, young Louis had had fifty Brazilian species to work on. Now he found two thousand which pleased him more than two thousand gold mines. He discovered glacial phenomena down there in the tropics as clear as any he had seen in Maine or England or the Alps. He furnished himself with material for lectures which he would give at the Lowell Institute and at Cooper Institute, and for a book about Brazil which would keep Elizabeth busy for a while. He brought out with all his specimens and widened horizons of knowledge, enough good health and happiness to last him a long time. A profitable trip, which had included as side pleasures the lectures in French which he loved to give, and which were as crowded by Brazilian society as ever his Boston lectures, and as enthusiastically received by the ladies who had never before been permitted to attend public lectures. No wonder they remembered the magic of Agassiz!
In August, 1866, he was home again, and if the museum did not enlarge its capacity now, it would find itself surrounded by boxes and barrels instead of a swamp. For not only had Louis brought back enough for Harvard, but plenty to exchange for specimens from other universities. It was about this time when Cambridge was heavy with sticky heat, and all the carefully worked out order of the year turned into uproar and confusion, that Alexander quite justifiably felt he needed a vacation.
For some time he had been eking out his salary with directorship of some mines in Pennsylvania. Now Pauline’s husband, Quincy Shaw, had become interested in a man from the copper mines of Lake Superior who claimed that he had stumbled upon a rich lode. Mr. Shaw and his friends financed the proposition and called it the Calumet mine. Alexander decided to take his vacation by going up to look it over. He saw riches enough to make him borrow a little money and secure an interest in the mines which now included more land to the south called the Hecla mine. And so was formed the nucleus of a great fortune for the Agassiz family. Not gained without great effort though, for Alexander had to go up to Calumet for two hard years fighting incompetence, dishonesty, and the sort of living that only a man of tough fiber could stand. His young wife came along, too, with two babies, and learned the necessity of wearing a revolver strapped to her wrist when she took them out. The Agassiz men had hardihood, but so had the women they chose as wives.
It was two years before the young Agassizes were settled again in Cambridge, but when they came back, the Calumet and Hecla mine was running smoothly and beginning to pay dividends. The employees whom he had left behind were earning good wages and living in comfort, the best of safety devices for the future. Alexander had provided for himself what his father had never had, enough money to finance all the scientific expeditions of his own and his father’s accumulated longings. Nor can anyone tell whether they gave him more pleasure and profit than the harum-scarum, debt-ridden, high-hearted expeditions of Louis Agassiz.
Alexander was ready for a real vacation then, and in a curious way he repeated his father’s experience abroad. Letters from Louis brought him warm welcome from all the scientists there, older men indeed, but interested in this son of their dear friend. Back into Switzerland where his children for once saw him excited and talkative. But no grandmother to visit this time and to show proudly her great-grandchildren. Rose Agassiz had lived eight ripe and generous years after her son, Louis, had said good-bye to her, and now she was gone. She was old, and her life was fulfilled.
For the first time Louis faced real sorrow. The world without his mother in it was an empty place. What if she was eighty-four? He was still alive, and he needed her. Elizabeth at his side was very tender with him, and slipped quietly a little further into Rose Agassiz’s place. He missed her less than he imagined, and did not know the reason why. Yet Agassiz sorrowed deeply, and in the spring fell ill himself of
a heart attack which housed him and quieted him until the middle of summer.
Suddenly he was well again, and restless to be off. A group of congressmen and business men were taking a holiday which they invited him to join, a chance to study glaciers, which would be an unusual way for the modern tired business man to take a vacation. Louis went along with them, and as usual, gave himself and everybody else a very good time. On the way back he stopped for two months at Ithaca where a new college, called Cornell, was opening and where he was promptly offered an appointment of nonresident professor to give annually a brief course of lectures. He as promptly accepted because he liked the idea of a university on such good glacial foundations, and one that intended to combine manual work with study. Besides what was another course of lectures, more or less?
When he came back to Cambridge, he found that his museum had begun at last to make progress under its own steam. The legislature had granted seventy-five thousand dollars for an extension of the building and subscription had raised as much more. That, with the war scarcely over, too! In all, Agassiz had succeeded in capturing over four hundred thousand dollars for his museum, though he probably thought of it only as a little sum here and there. With this money the north wing was nearly finished. Slow, slow work, and hard for us who have worked in its laboratories and studied its collections to realize. Hard for us to visualize its isolated north corner standing there in the swamp, crammed to its eaves with unassorted material which we see so neatly shelved and cased. Hard to realize the lion-maned, lion-hearted man who tramped up and down those stairs, who directed everybody and everything; sometimes mistakenly, but who is infallible? Hard to know, really know, what a project like this meant in war times, and when science was for the few.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 28
