Epilogue

DURING THE GREAT California earthquake of 1906, the stone shelf supporting a marble statue of Louis Agassiz on the second story of the north wall of Stanford University’s Zoology building failed, and the statue plunged headfirst into the ground below. And when people came running to see what had happened, there he was: head buried to his shoulders, feet in the air. According to an eyewitness account, they “couldn’t help laughing, and one fellow went up and shook hands with him.”¹ Among the stories that circulated about Agassiz’s graceless fall from a great height was a charitable if cheeky one that attributed the accident to scientific curiosity: when the earthquake occurred, Agassiz, ever the determined geologist, stuck his head underground to find out what was going on; his finger pointed at an imaginary audience as if to say “Hark! Listen!” (No other marble celebrities then represented on the wall were similarly inclined: Gutenberg, Franklin, and Humboldt stayed right where they belonged.) An edgier campus joke, reported by none other than Stanford president David Starr Jordan, one of Agassiz’s former pupils, claimed the calamity proved that “Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.”² Miraculously, when the deeply imbedded statue was recovered, it was found that only the nose had shattered. The outstretched hand remained intact.

 

Agassiz in the ground, 1906. Picture postcard.

 

The dramatic photograph of the marble scientist, head firmly lodged in the concrete, became one of the most iconic images associated with the earthquake. Although Mr. Agassiz’s statue was eventually restored to its rightful place next to his mentor Humboldt, any image search for Agassiz on Google will yield this photograph within the first dozen hits. And this indeed is how he is most often remembered—a somewhat comical version of Mozart’s marble Commendatore, intent on having his revenge, but, with his head stuck in the ground and his historical nose broken, unable to drag anyone down with him. My own Agassiz, the one I have tried to portray in this book, is different: not pitiful but still wrong, a man and scientist possessed of great personal charisma as well as great personal flaws. What interests me about the fallen Agassiz—as it did the unnamed Stanford student—is less his broken nose than the extended finger, still pointing, still telling others what to do, even as its owner was lodged upside-down in the ground, his head surrounded by darkness. “Hark! Listen!”

As early as 1906, though, no one had harked for a while. Shortly after Agassiz’s death, his scientific goals enjoyed a brief revival in the Agassiz Association, founded by the Massachusetts librarian Harlan Hoge Ballard. It spawned close to a thousand local chapters, or science clubs, from Lenox, Massachusetts, to Traverse City, Michigan, all the way to Garden Grove, California. In the end, though, this movement, devoted to introducing young people to nature study and the basics of natural history collecting, had little measurable impact on mainstream science.³ To be sure, Agassiz’s Stanford statue was quickly restored to its former place. But at the time of the earthquake, his specimen-stuffed, incomplete museum, a grand attempt to represent nature as completely as possible, had become a thing of the past. While his son, Alexander, expanded the museum to facilitate research carried out by the experts, he abandoned his father’s Humboldtian ambitions, replacing the idea of a great synoptic hall with a sequence of interconnected smaller rooms, filled with representative specimens—luminous details. “When taken together,” said Alexander about his selections, “they illustrate the animal kingdom as a whole in its general relations, and in its geographical and palaeontological range and distribution.” Where Agassiz had wanted to look widely, his son echoed his picnicking stepmother’s comment on Agassiz’s investigations in the Galápagos. He emphasized the need to look deeply. Nothing here could be comprehended at a glance. The truth requires a third look. And a fourth. And a fifth.⁴

When Alfred Russel Wallace, whose own work on natural selection had forced Darwin to go public with his theory before he felt quite ready, visited Agassiz’s museum in 1886, he found not a complete library of the works of God, as the elder Agassiz had hoped. He saw instead carefully chosen pages from it, a deliberately incomplete record that cried out for visitors to put two and two together and tell the whole story themselves: “The rodents, for example, are illustrated by means of stuffed specimens and skeletons of an agouti, a porcupine, a rabbit, a squirrel, a jerboa . . . the ungulates by a small tapir and a young hippopotamus,” and so on. But that was just fine by Wallace. He appreciated the extensive textual commentary Alexander and his staff had provided and lavished praise on the economy of their displays, which were so different from the disorganized heaps of bones and jaws and teeth a visitor would see displayed in British museums.⁵ What Alexander Agassiz’s museum revealed to Wallace was not nature itself, but an idea about it, a narrative—ironically, the one the elder Agassiz had opposed all his life, with all his might—namely, that life on earth is in constant flux, that the more things change, the less they remain the same. Instead of suggesting to visitors that nature itself was present here, needing no further explanation than what a pair of eyes could see, Alex Agassiz’s exhibition rooms represented a human intellectual construction, an “abstract,” like Darwin’s famous book, not the full truth about nature.

And yet, as Louis Agassiz drifts into the sunset of this narrative, it is worth remembering how his struggles, problems, and aspirations are still with us. Yes, we haven’t moved beyond his biases and blindnesses as much as we would like to think we have, but that isn’t all. In my view, Louis Agassiz was never more interesting than when he argued that science ought to be part of the general fabric of society. Here, we have fallen far short. A 2009 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science revealed that only 52 percent of Americans knew how stem cells differ from other kinds of cells and that just 46 percent of those polled were aware that atoms are larger than electrons. On a highly controversial topic such as global warming, the gap between scientists and the public was remarkable: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of ordinary citizens, thought emissions attributed to human activities are causing global warming.⁶ Agassiz’s glaciers are melting fast, but half of the American population doesn’t know why. Nor do they seem to care too much. But such ignorance doesn’t seem to prevent them from weighing in on issues they know little about: “On politicized issues like climate change, embryonic stem cell research, the teaching of evolution, and the safety of vaccines, many Americans not only question scientific expertise but even feel entitled to discard it completely,” write Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, authors of Unscientific America, a recent study that recommends that scientists spend more time on public outreach and sketches out opportunities for an entirely new relationship between them and the public. In the current stalemate (overspecialized scientists on one side, turning their backs to the bovine masses of passive consumers clutching their television remotes on the other), it’s up to the scientists to be creative. Or at least that’s how Mooney and Kirshenbaum envision it: “No longer merely a distant voice of authority, the scientist could . . . become an everyday guide and ally, a listener as much as a lecturer. There’s no doubt members of the public must become much more knowledgeable about science and its importance. But scientists must also become far more involved with—and knowledgeable about—the public.”⁷

But this lovely dream has pitfalls. If the professionals begin to mingle with the amateurs, how does one separate one from the other? Can one hide behind the other and vice versa? Friendship means familiarity. Will scientists begin to feel confident about assessing the needs of ordinary Americans, just as those ordinary Americans feel free to judge the actions of the scientific community? That was the vision Rachel Carson promoted in Silent Spring (1962), her hugely successful indictment of a cadre of specialists who had become isolated, with lethal consequences, from the rest of the world.⁸ Agassiz’s utopian hope, throughout his life, had been to avoid such a split. He firmly believed that, yes, God—any God worth our worship—worked according to something like human intellectual powers and that therefore the only obstacles to our understanding were the ones we imposed on ourselves. Science to Louis Agassiz had always been a grand affair, not a matter of bits and pieces, parts of a whole. At the same time it was a little thing too, as tiny as a moon snail in our hand, as easy as a child’s puzzle-game.⁹

Today, we live in a world of ecological and economic limits now, whereas to Louis Agassiz the world had seemed limitless. In his opinion, all lay people, as long as they followed his guidance, could turn themselves into scientists; all amateurs (particularly those who agreed with him) were, he hoped, potential professionals. According to Elizabeth’s slightly different view, it was fine, even empowering, to remain an amateur, as long as there was a cooperative scientist nearby to provide information and perspective: an “everyday guide and ally” like her husband. To some extent, that was the principle behind her commitment to the Agassiz School for Young Ladies and Radcliffe College: the ambition to provide an outlet for the female desire for high-quality education that would not seem to threaten the male establishment, though it would profit from it and permanently change it. One important result of her demotion of Agassiz to a bit player in her writings on the Hassler expedition was her own promotion to amateur arbiter and judge, giving carte blanche to all those who, like herself, wanted to think and voice their opinions on science but did not conduct actual fieldwork or experiments.¹⁰ Elizabeth Agassiz thus contributed substantially to the emergence of popular science writing, a genre that flourishes despite the fact that mainstream science continues to see itself as a heroic, specialist enterprise.¹¹

The history of science is unforgiving: it remembers those who were right and commits to the dustbin those who were wrong. And wrong Agassiz certainly was, dead wrong, about evolution and about race. Nevertheless, his formula for work in science even today continues to seem both noxious and weirdly seductive: Do your science while beholden both to God and the world of facts, and the “connected picture,” the truth, will reveal itself, coherently, completely, beautifully.¹²

“SPLENDOUR! IT ALL COHERES!” wrote the poet Ezra Pound, one of Agassiz’s great twentieth-century admirers, in his notes to The Women of Trachis, a play by Sophocles that he translated in 1954. He was celebrating the heroic Heracles, a man who had spent his life moving from one adventure to the next, taking advantage of everyone and everything around him, but who was now, finally, luminous in death. But when Pound, some years later, was hoping to bring The Cantos to a close, his gigantic attempt to, in his own words, “make Cosmos” and to do for poetry what Agassiz had tried to do for science, he found himself pleading only for a “little light”—any light, really—that would lead him, and us, “back to splendour.”¹³