During the 1906 earthquake in California, a statue of the scientist Louis Agassiz fell from its perch, plunging the marble head of the Swiss-born naturalist straight into the ground and leaving his feet sticking up in the air. That seems to be where Agassiz still rests: head in the sand, feet in the air, something of a laughingstock. And as Christoph Irmscher points out in his new biography, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, most people today don’t know who Agassiz is—or if they do, they “tend to think of [him] as a misguided, opportunistic bigot.” Irmscher, a professor of English at Indiana University, is the author of an excellent study of American science writing, The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James. That book includes a fine chapter on Agassiz, which the author has now expanded into a readable, well-informed and occasionally irritating biography.
Irmscher emphasizes early on that he’s not about to tidy up Agassiz’s image, although the celebrated scientist once wowed antebellum audiences in the United States, taught brilliant young scientists at Harvard, established the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and became the “Johnny Appleseed of science” (or so the cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks once called him). Wielding his considerable influence, Agassiz also tried to prevent Darwin’s theories from being accepted in the United States and was a “craven racist” (Irmscher’s words) who emphatically pronounced black men and women, as well as Native Americans and Asians, decidedly inferior to Caucasians.
All this leaves Irmscher with what he calls “a challenging [tale] to tell.” Of course, such challenges are the bane or the blessing (largely both) of anyone who writes about a pockmarked character (most are), or about a subject whose life and work don’t fit in with the current moral zeitgeist. And Agassiz is certainly out of step: fifty years ago, his biographer Edward Lurie called his racial views “tragic,” while the eminent biologist Stephen Jay Gould—the first to publish Agassiz’s unexpurgated letters about racial difference—points out that Agassiz was so much on the wrong side of the debates about Darwin and race that when he died, at age 66, he was almost totally isolated from the scientific community. Frustrated, stubborn and committed to bad science, the great naturalist, in Gould’s view, was a bit of a fallen angel. His story is one of the intrepid pursuit of a perverse idea: that the world was created in one way, and one way only, by a designing God who left nothing to chance. Agassiz resolved to prove that conclusion no matter what.
Though he largely agrees with Gould, Irmscher tacks in a slightly different direction. He claims that Agassiz was a man of contradictions, one who wanted to be rigorous but also wanted (needed?) to be popular; who established science as a “collective enterprise” but imperiously demanded credit for the research conducted under his auspices; who disliked slavery but also blacks (though in his day this wasn’t much of a contradiction); and who never stopped talking even as his reputation sank deeper into an embarrassed silence.
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Born in 1807 in Môtier, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant minister who wanted him to study medicine, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz left the University of Zurich at age 21 for Heidelberg University and then the University of Munich, where he also studied natural history. Soon he dropped medicine altogether; Agassiz’s prodigious talents—he’d already earned two doctorates—and his gift for finding powerful mentors lay elsewhere. As the student of Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, he helped compile a volume about Amazonian fish from Martius’s collection, which resulted in his first publication, and in 1831, Agassiz was in Paris studying with the brilliant Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes. The conservative Cuvier happened to be an opponent of the zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that organisms change because of pressures from within and without; Agassiz inclined toward Cuvier’s more fixed sense of a geology on which the history of the earth had been written.