Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

Chapter 7: 1834-1837: Aet. 27-30.

• First visit to England.
-- reception by scientific men. -- work on fossil fishes there. -- liberality of English naturalists. -- first relations with American science. -- farther correspondence with Humboldt. -- second visit to England. -- continuation of ‘fossil fishes.’ -- other scientific publications. -- attention drawn to glacial phenomena. -- summer at Bex with Charpentier. -- sale of original drawings for ‘fossil fishes.’ -- meeting of Helvetic Society. -- address on ice-period. -- letters from Humboldt and Von Buch.

Agassiz always looked back with delight on this first visit to Great Britain. It was the beginning of his life-long friendship with Buckland, Sedgwick, Murchison, Lyell, and [250] others of like pursuits and interests. Made welcome in many homes, he could scarcely respond to all the numerous invitations, social and scientific, which followed the Edinburgh meeting.

Guided by Dr. Buckland, to whom not only every public and private collection, but every rare specimen in the United Kingdom, seems to have been known, he wandered from treasure to treasure. Every day brought its revelation, until, under the accumulation of new facts, he almost felt himself forced to begin afresh the work he had believed well advanced. He might have been discouraged by a wealth of resources which seemed to open countless paths, leading he knew not whither, but for the generosity of the English naturalists who allowed him to cull, out of sixty or more collections, two thousand specimens of fossil fishes, and to send them to London, where, by the kindness of the Geological Society, he was permitted to deposit them in a room in Somerset House. The mass of materials once sifted and arranged, the work of comparison and identification became comparatively easy. He sent at once for his faithful artist, Mr. Dinkel, who began, without delay, to copy all such specimens as [251] threw new light on the history of fossil fishes, a work which detained him in England for several years.

Agassiz made at this time two friends, whose sympathy and cooperation in his scientific work were invaluable to him for the rest of his life. Sir Philip Egerton and Lord Cole (Earl of Enniskillen) owned two of the most valuable collections of fossil fishes in Great Britain.¹ To aid him in his researches, their most precious specimens were placed at Agassiz's disposition; his artist was allowed to work for months on their collections, and even after Agassiz came to America, they never failed to share with him, as far as possible, the advantages arising from the increase of their museums. From this time his correspondence with them, and especially with Sir Philip Egerton, is closely connected with the ever-growing interest as well as with the difficulties of his scientific career. Reluctantly, and with many a backward look, he left England in October, and returned to his lectures in Neuchatel, taking with him such specimens as were indispensable to the progress of his work. Every hour of the following winter which could be spared from his lectures was devoted to his fossil fishes. [252]

A letter of this date from Professor Silliman, of New Haven, Connecticut, marks the beginning of his relations with his future New England home, and announces his first New England subscribers.

Agassiz little dreamed, as he read this letter, how familiar these far-off localities would become to him, or how often, in after years, he would traverse by day and by night the four miles which lay between Boston and his home in Cambridge.

Agassiz still sought and received, as we see by the following letter, Humboldt's sympathy in every step of his work.

The above letter, though written in May, did not reach Agassiz until the end of July, when he was again on his way to England, where his answer is dated. [257]

His second visit to England, during which the above letter was written, was chiefly spent in reviewing the work of his artist, whom he now reinforced with a second draughtsman, M. Weber, the same who had formerly worked with him in Munich. He also attended the meeting of the British Association in Dublin, stayed a few days at Oulton Park for another look at the collections of Sir Philip Egerton, made a second grand tour among the other fossil fishes of England and Ireland, and returned to Neuchatel, leaving his two artists in London with their hands more than full.

While Agassiz thus pursued his work on fossil fishes with ardor and an almost perilous audacity, in view of his small means, he found also time for various other investigations. During the year 1836, though pushing forward constantly the publication of the ‘Poissons Fossiles,’ his ‘Prodromus of the Class of Echinodermata’ appeared in the Memoirs of the Natural History Society of Neuchatel, as well as his paper on the fossil Echini belonging to the Neocomien group of the Neuchatel Jura, accompanied by figures. Not long after, he published in the Memoirs of the Helvetic Society his descriptions of fossil Echini peculiar to Switzerland, and issued also the first [260] number of a more extensive work, ‘Monographie d'echinodermes.’ During this year he received a new evidence of the sympathy of the English naturalists, in the Wollaston medal awarded to him by the London Geological Society.

The summer of 1836 was an eventful one for Agassiz,—the opening, indeed, of a new and brilliant chapter in his life. The attention of the ignorant and the learned had alike been called to the singular glacial phenomena of movement and transportation in the Alpine valleys. The peasant had told his strange story of boulders carried on the back of the ice, of the alternate retreat and advance of glaciers, now shrinking to narrower limits, now plunging forward into adjoining fields, by some unexplained power of expansion and contraction. Scientific men were awake to the interest of these facts, but had considered them only as local phenomena. Venetz and Charpentier were the first to detect their wider significance. The former traced the ancient limits of the Alpine glaciers as defined by the frame-work of debris or loose material they had left behind them; and Charpentier went farther, and affirmed that all the erratic boulders scattered over the plain of Switzerland [261] and on the sides of the Jura had been thus distributed by ice and not by water, as had been supposed.

Agassiz was among those who received this hypothesis as improbable and untenable. Still, he was anxious to see the facts in place, and Charpentier was glad to be his guide. He therefore passed his vacation, during this summer of 1836, at the pretty town of Bex, in the valley of the Rhone. Here he spent a number of weeks in explorations, which served at the same time as a relaxation from his more sedentary work. He went expecting to confirm his own doubts, and to disabuse his friend Charpentier of his errors. But after visiting with him the glaciers of the Diablerets, those of the valley of Chamounix, and the moraines of the great valley of the Rhone and its principal lateral valleys, he came away satisfied that a too narrow interpretation of the phenomena was Charpentier's only mistake.

During this otherwise delightful summer, he was not without renewed anxiety lest he should be obliged to suspend the publication of the Fossil Fishes for want of means to carry it on. On this account he writes from Bex to Sir Philip Egerton in relation to the sale of his original drawings, the only property he possessed. [262] ‘It is absolutely impossible,’ he says, ‘for me to issue even another number until this sale is effected. . . . I shall consider myself more than repaid if I receive, in exchange for the whole collection of drawings, simply what I have expended upon them, provided I may keep those which have yet to be lithographed until that be done.’

Sir Philip made every effort to effect a sale to the British Museum. He failed at the moment, but the collection was finally purchased and presented to the British Museum by a generous relative of his own, Lord Francis Egerton. In the mean time, Sir Philip and Lord Cole, in order to make it possible for Agassiz to retain the services of Mr. Dinkel, proposed to pay his expenses while he was drawing such specimens from their own collections as were needed for the work. These drawings were, of course, finally to remain their own property.

During his sojourn at Bex, Agassiz's intellect and imagination had been deeply stirred by the glacial phenomena. In the winter of 1837, on his return to Neuchatel, he investigated anew the slopes of the Jura, and found that the facts there told the same story. Although he resumed with unabated ardor his [263] various works on fishes, radiates, and mollusks, a new chapter of nature was all the while unfolding itself in his fertile brain. When the Helvetic Association assembled at Neuchatel in the following summer, the young president, from whom the members had expected to hear new tidings of fossil fishes, startled them by the presentation of a glacial theory, in which the local erratic phenomena of the Swiss valleys assumed a cosmic significance. It is worthy of remark here that the first large outlines in which Agassiz, when a young man, planned his intellectual work gave the key-note to all that followed. As the generalizations on which all his future zoological researches were based, are sketched in the Preface to his ‘Poissons Fossiles,’ so his opening address to the Helvetic Society in 1837 unfolds the glacial period as a whole, much as he saw it at the close of his life, after he had studied the phenomena on three continents. In this address he announced his conviction that a great ice-period, due to a temporary oscillation of the temperature of the globe, had covered the surface of the earth with a sheet of ice, extending at least from the north pole to Central Europe and Asia. ‘Siberian winter,’ he says, ‘established itself [264] for a time over a world previously covered with a rich vegetation and peopled with large mammalia, similar to those now inhabiting the warm regions of India and Africa. Death enveloped all nature in a shroud, and the cold, having reached its highest degree, gave to this mass of ice, at the maximum of tension, the greatest possible hardness.’ In this novel presentation the distribution of erratic boulders, instead of being classed among local phenomena, was considered ‘as one of the accidents accompanying the vast change occasioned by the fall of the temperature of our globe before the commencement of our epoch.’

This was, indeed, throwing the gauntlet down to the old expounders of erratic phenomena upon the principle of floods, freshets, and floating ice. Many well-known geologists were present at the meeting, among them Leopold von Buch, who could hardly contain his indignation, mingled with contempt, for what seemed to him the view of a youthful and inexperienced observer. One would have liked to hear the discussion which followed, in special section, between Von Buch, Charpentier, and Agassiz. Elie de Beaumont, who should have made the fourth, did not arrive till later. Difference of opinion, however, never disturbed [265] the cordial relation which existed between Von Buch and his young opponent. Indeed, Agassiz's reverence and admiration for Von Buch was then, and continued throughout his life, deep and loyal.

Not alone from the men who had made these subjects their special study, did Agassiz meet with discouragements. The letters of his beloved mentor, Humboldt, in 1837, show how much he regretted that any part of his young friend's energy should be diverted from zoology, to a field of investigation which he then believed to be one of theory rather than of precise demonstration. He was, perhaps, partly influenced by the fact that he saw through the prejudiced eyes of his friend Von Buch. ‘Over your and Charpentier's moraines,’ he says, in one of his letters, ‘Leopold von Buch rages, as you may already know, considering the subject, as he does, his exclusive property. But I too, though by no means so bitterly opposed to new views, and ready to believe that the boulders have not all been moved by the same means, am yet inclined to think the moraines due to more local causes.’

The next letter shows that Humboldt was seriously anxious lest this new field of activity, [266] with its fascinating speculations, should draw Agassiz away from his ichthyological researches.

A letter of about the same date from Von Buch shows that, however he might storm at Agassiz's heterodox geology, he was in full sympathy with his work in general.