Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs (2005)

Part I

Chapter 2. Neuchâtel

Alexander Agassiz at age twelve, from a drawing by his mother

I

ALEXANDER AGASSIZ first appeared in a scientific work at age four, when a pen-and-ink drawing of him fishing graced the cover of a volume in his father’s series about central European freshwater fish, Histoire naturelle des poissons d’eau douce de l’Europe central. The illustration was executed by Joseph Dinkel, an artist who worked faithfully and effectively for Louis for more than fifteen years, adding much to Louis’s reputation; his kind disposition also made him beloved company to young Alex. It’s a happy picture, suggesting, as Louis surely recognized, a creative, independent life integrating aesthetic, physical, and intellectual pleasures with family and work. Louis’s letters make it clear that he believed he had created such a life. But as is so often the case with the family pictures we choose to share, Dinkel’s drawing reflected Louis’s most flattering self-conception. Events would prove this bucolic happiness illusory. Covering as it does a work whose authorship was contested and whose production strained Louis’s home life, the picture subverts its own imagery. And the fishing child, this embodiment of innocence and curiosity, would soon find himself cast on inhospitable shores.

2

Most of Louis’s preeminent biographers-people like Jules Marcou, who knew him well personally, and Edward Lurie, who researched him exhaustively-mark Cuvier’s death as a great loss in Louis Agas-siz’s career, for it removed at a critical time the one figure who might have taught him to discipline his energies and restrain his wilder theoretical impulses, things both Louis’s father and Humboldt tried but failed to teach him. While the insight seems accurate, one wonders, given the effusiveness of Louis’s energies, compulsions, and narcissism, if even Cuvier could have curbed him.

It seems safe to say, however, that at least Louis’s earlier career might have gone differently. Had Cuvier lived longer, he probably would have helped Louis secure a position in Paris, where he might have risen to replace Cuvier as a leader of European science, not to mention salon life. As it was, the weeks after Cuvier’s death found Louis in a Paris packed with ambitious prodigies. His only offer was an invitation from Cuvier’s publisher to work with Achille Valenciennes, another Cuvier protégé, to complete the master’s immense fish-classification project. Louis passed, for he was not eager to collaborate on anything when he had Cuvier’s fossil fish project all to himself. (The sheer size of the Valenciennes project may have daunted him too. It would grow to twenty-two volumes, and Valenciennes would die thirty-three years later not having completed it.) Collaboration was not to be Louis’s style. What he wanted were protégés of his own.

As Louis’s luck would have it, his mother soon relayed word of a new college and museum of natural history being formed in Neuchâ-tel, a small city near his hometown of Môtier. Aided by an introduc- tion from Humboldt and an artful letter of his own hinting at pressing offers in Paris, he won the directorship of the museum and the col lege’s natural history curricula. His position would be funded partly by the Prussian king and partly by contributions from the town’s aristocracy who had been rallied by Louis’s uncle, François Mayor.

So in September 1832 Louis Agassiz, twenty-five years old, returned home having realized many of his early academic and professional goals. He eagerly took up his new duties. He found he could give brilliant lectures with minimal preparation. This left him more time for writing Poissons fossiles, the study Cuvier had passed him, and to establish a natural history society into which he invited many of the town’s leading citizens-an astute move in generating more excitement about his presence. He also organized children’s outings and evening lectures for the public at the museum, making it a vital and exciting new civic institution.

In the relatively small arena of Neuchâtel-a regional market center of around six thousand people-this brilliant young professor instantly stood out; if he wasn’t yet first naturalist of Europe, he certainly was of Neuchâtel. Agassiz enjoyed this experience so much that he turned down an offer, only a few weeks into his new job, to take a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, a more prestigious institution where he had been a student six years earlier. He realized he liked starting things. Besides, he and Neuchâtel were infatuated with each other. Louis had charmed the town’s financial and civic leaders, and for the time he felt he could get anything he wanted. Few could engender enthusiasm for the future as readily as Louis Agassiz did, and few enjoyed being adored more than he.

He had been working a more personal charm for several years on Cécile Braun, the sister of his old classmate and fencing partner Alexander Braun. He’d fallen for Cécile while a guest at the Braun house, in Carlsruhe, Germany, when he and Alexander were studying in nearby Heidelberg. Having grown closer on subsequent visits over the years, the two had been waiting only for Louis to find stable employment to marry. The time had come.

Their engagement initially raised mixed emotions in Cécile’s family. Alexander Braun, who had spent several years around Louis, recognized that while he was generous, affectionate, and rarely short on cheer, he also held an inflated view of himself and what he could take on, traits that could overwhelm a spouse, particularly one as gentle and shy as Cécile. Yet Braun, succumbing to the charm to which no one seemed immune and impressed by Louis’s rise in Paris, swallowed those worries, and in the fall of 1832 he and his parents endorsed the engagement. The couple married a year later in Carls-ruhe, and Cécile joined Louis in Neuchâtel.

Their prospects seemed good. Though Louis earned only a free apartment, board, and the equivalent of around four hundred dollars a year (about eight thousand dollars today), his potential seemed unlimited. Both his and Cécile’s families and the town’s leaders seemed to share his ambitions for himself and the new museum. In a pattern that would hold throughout his life, his optimism and the proven generosity of others made him confident that he could raise any necessary resources. Both his own family and his mentors, including Cuvier and Humboldt, had already thrown money his way when he ran short of funds to pay the artist Dinkel or obtain specimens. He kept making big plans and, through a combination of hard work, good luck, and charm, realizing them; he thus convinced him self and others that he could execute ever larger plans.

His home life held similar promise. In Cécile, Louis had found a woman and a family that broadened his world both culturally and financially. Cécile, raised in a cultured upper-middle-class family, had experience in music, art, and literature that Louis coveted. He was enchanted by her home in Carlsruhe, a large house with spacious grounds where an afternoon might be spent studying botanical specimens from the nearby oak forest and the evening singing four-part Bach chorales. Cécile’s talent as an artist enthralled him. In an early bonding experience, he sat (one must guess cheerfully) while she drew his portrait. And though he already employed Dinkel to draw his specimens, that work expanded with every new research or publishing project. The idea of Cécile’s helping with specimen illustration excited them both and gave them a sense of joint endeavor. It hurt not a whit that her family had money.

Alexander von Humboldt, one of the few people Louis looked up to, approved. In a letter congratulating Louis on his engagement, he wrote, “It is not enough to be praised and recognized as a great and profound naturalist; to this one must add domestic happiness as well.” In the same note he gave Louis a prod, by way of positive rein forcement, to curb his megalomania: “It is a pleasure to watch the growing renown of those who are dear to us; and who should merit success more than you, whose elevation of character is proof against the temptations of literary self-love?” If there was a hint and a warning in that compliment, Louis seemed to miss it.

Over the next decade or so, amid the distractions of running a curriculum and establishing a new museum, Louis Agassiz performed the best and most substantial scientific work of his career, making major contributions with his fish fossil study and then his famous ice age theory.

Louis worked hard on Poissons fossiles, the taxonomic survey of fossil fish he published in five installments beginning in 1833. Having mastered the collections in Paris, Munich, and Heidelberg, he traveled Europe examining those elsewhere, a tour that gave him a comprehensive knowledge of virtually all known fossil fish and the museums that housed them-and let him impress everyone with his sharp eye, quick mind, flawless memory, and tremendous gift for talk. These travels created keen anticipation for the book.

The first volume seemed to confirm these expectations. Louis’s descriptions and classifications, illustrated with Dinkel’s exquisite drawings, beautifully realized the taxonomist’s task. And if the book’s gentle insistence that this order contradicted any notions of evolution seems archaic today, it did not then; rather, the work’s synthesis of taxonomy, comparative anatomy, and paleontology added weight to Louis’s assertion that the evidence he had gathered, with significant gaps between seemingly similar species, showed that “species do not pass insensibly one into another” but “appear and disappear un expectedly, without direct relations with their precursors.” The project met warm reception in all quarters. Adam Sedgwick, a leading geologist and a vital early mentor to Charles Darwin, would write Charles Lyell, the world’s most prominent geologist, that he thought Poissons“by far the most important work now on hand in the geological field.”* Lyell, whose Principles of Geology was causing a reevaluation of geological history contrary to Agassiz’s view, also praised the work, saying that Agassiz’s “knowledge of natural history surprises me the more I know of him.”

Poissons, emerging over the following decade, made a strange document. Despite its taxonomic breadth and descriptive acuity Agassiz’s use of a taxonomic shortcut-he categorized fish using the external features and scales, rather than by the more laborious but exacting method of comparing their internal anatomy-somewhat compromised the long-term value of the classifications. But if its tax onomy did not hold up as well as Cuvier’s, the book greatly advanced fish paleontology. The work’s essay portions, meanwhile, used an early version of the circular creationist argument that Louis would later stick to so ferociously, an argument that, despite his professed allegiance to a strict inductivism, climbs far out on a speculative limb. Like any decent scientist or curious human, Louis could not resist seeking patterns in what he saw. And like Cuvier, he believed the taxonomic evidence showed no sign of transmutation and proved that species “changed” only by a series of mass extinctions and subsequent re-creations-a sort of global delete-and-replace pattern left by a God who revised his own work.

This vision raised an obvious and troubling question: What did God use for these waves of extinction and creation? Noah’s flood could account for only one such revision (and hardly explained fish extinctions), and the fossil record showed at least several successions of similar species. This suggested either a continuous evolution-like progression or (if you were inclined to see waves of extinction and re creation) at least several massive, worldwide revisions. If you wanted to buttress creationism with science, as Agassiz did, you had to come up with more than just a single catastrophe.

Agassiz soon stumbled on what seemed a likely answer. In one of his greatest contributions, he pioneered the idea of the ice age, expanding it from glacial studies in the Alps and receiving primary credit (albeit disputed) for a concept that would explain a huge range of phenomena. His development of the theory also showed a pen chant for drama and controversy that would emerge repeatedly thereafter.

In the summer of 1836, Johann de Charpentier, a mining engineer and amateur geologist who ran a salt mine in the Rhône Valley, invited Louis to vacation at his house in nearby Vaud. He said he had some geology he wanted to show him. Louis had heard about Char-pentier’s odd ideas: that the grinding action of glaciers was responsible for turning the Alps and surrounding areas into such grooved terrain, and that glaciers also created the landscape features that we now know as glacial moraines and erratics, the fields of detritus and huge boulders, respectively, that in many areas seem to have fallen from the sky, so detached are they from any likely point of origin. Charpentier had been introduced to this theory in 1829 by a younger colleague, Ignace Venetz, who had first heard it in 1820 from a chamois-hunter named Jean-Pierre Parraudin; Parraudin had hit upon a rough glacial-age theory as the answer to why so many boulders sat perched on hilltops. Charpentier had resisted this notion when Parraudin pitched it to him years before, but he converted when Venetz, having taken it up, elaborated it convincingly at a lecture Charpentier attended. In his subsequent walks around the Alps he became utterly convinced that glaciers had once covered most of the Alps, carving deep valleys and leaving boulders and moraines strewn about. Over the early 1830s he expounded the idea as widely as he could in talks and meetings.

In a series of hikes that summer of 1836, Charpentier slowly sold the idea to Louis, who was also initially quite skeptical. Agassiz slowly overruled his reservations because, as many would experience in the years ahead, the glacial theory provided convincing explanations-a shock of recognition and clarity-for numerous landscape phenomena. It radically altered one’s view of the earth. Striated and polished rocks, boulders left in strange places, gravel ridges, block- shaped depressions, and countless other oddities all suddenly made sense. The ice age was one of those ideas that make everything fall into place and let you see things you hadn’t seen before. In that sense, it met the standard we generally apply today for a useful theory: It provided the most plausible explanation for a breadth of data.

As Charpentier showed him around, Louis found the theory increasingly attractive, and when he got back to Neuchâtel he pondered it excitedly. Glaciers, he realized, could explain not only scratched rocks, erratic boulders, and kettles (the depressions where ice blocks had melted), but the question of how God cleaned house and rebuilt. They were “God’s great plough,” as he would put it in his lectures, a biological eraser as effective as any flood, and their repeated, massive occurrences in successive ice ages (the term Eiszeitwas coined by his friend and colleague Karl Schimper as they discussed what Agassiz had seen) explained the gaps that he and other paleontologists had found in the fossil record. In these ice ages, he theorized, glaciers covered not just the mountains but all of temperate earth in huge sheets, reshaping the land and extinguishing almost all life.

It was a brilliant insight, and Agassiz’s application of it to the fossil record was inspired. This creative extension would have thrilled Cuvier. It ingeniously reconciled creationism with recent scientific principles such as uniformitarianism (also known as gradualism). First articulated by geologist James Hutton in 1795 and then skillfully deployed by Charles Lyell in his 1830 Principles of Geology, uniformitarianism was the argument that natural science must base its theories on forces presently and observably in effect. It was the latest step in science’s march toward empiricism-that is, toward theories based on demonstrable ties to observation. Western scientists (or “natural philosophers,” as they were called then) had practiced an increasingly self-conscious devotion to empiricism since at least Galileo’s time, and empirical principles had been especially boosted in Britain by the philosophy of John Locke in the 1700s. Hutton’s uniformitarianism was merely the geological expression of these principles. Just as Newtonian math rationalized physical phenomena in the 1600s and chemistry rose in the 1700s to replace alchemy, the gradualism of the 1800s offered a rational alternative to the prevailing catastrophism, which relied on spectacular, hypothetical, onetime past events to explain the landscape.

This move toward empiricism had repeatedly threatened religious views of the world, for observations sometimes clashed with theological explanations. Thus Galileo paid dearly for elaborating Copernicus’s observations proving that the earth circled the sun rather than vice versa. Louis’s ice age theory however, posed no such threat. Instead, it reconciled gradualism with catastrophism, for it provided a catastrophe you could observe in action, in small scale, in every alpine glacier. It therefore seemed to support a central creationist dynamic with evidence drawn from direct observation. In a career built on reconciling empirical method with creationist vision, the ice age was Louis Agassiz’s first great stroke.

Louis lost no time developing the idea. He immediately began buttressing it with his own observations and set about making the theory his. A year after visiting Charpentier, at the July 1837 meeting of the Swiss Society of Natural History, he gave a talk announcing his discovery that in a prehistoric ice age a huge sheet of ice had covered the earth from the North Pole at least as far south as the Mediter ranean, and that this accounted for much of Europe’s physiognomy. This lecture significantly extended Charpentier’s theory, which mainly concerned central and western Europe.

Louis began spending most of every summer in the Alps studying glaciers. In his frequent travels around Europe to look at fossil fish, he took every chance to seek more evidence of glaciation and to publicize his new ideas about the ice age. His lectures and field trips fascinated everyone, spreading his reputation spectacularly. (For Agassiz, a visit and a field trip threw far more influence than any number of published papers-one reason he talked more than he published.) After one of his trips to England, the British biologist Edward Forbes wrote him, “You have made all the geologists glacier-mad here, and they are turning Great Britain into an ice-house.” Though his ideas met some resistance in Britain because they contradicted Charles Lyell’s flood-based theories, Lyell himself as well as other leading geologists and naturalists soon agreed that Louis’s ice accounted for much of what they saw in the landscape. In a country thick with geologists, Louis’s ice age insights made him one of the most renowned.

One of his more intriguing triumphs came from applying the ice age theory to the mystery of the “parallel roads” of Glen Roy. These “roads,” so called because local lore pegged them as ancient trade or hunting paths, consisted of a series of three parallel terraces running along both sides of the Scottish valley of Glen Roy. Each terrace is roughly sixty feet wide and dead level. The highest lies eighty feet above the middle one, which runs about two hundred feet above the lowest. British scientists had been puzzling over them since the 1700s. Given the roads’ lack of slope and sand-and-gravel composition, most scientists agreed they were shorelines. But how did lake or seawater reach several hundred feet above the valley floor and almost two thou sand feet above sea level? The puzzle drew guesses from all quarters.

Passing judgment on Glen Roy, in fact, had been a rite of passage for British geologists for almost a century. Charles Darwin took his turn in 1838, when he visited it not long after returning from the Beaglevoyage. “I wandered the mountains in all directions,” he wrote Lyell, “and … without any exceptions, not even the first volcanic island [he saw on the Beagle voyage], the first elevated beach, or the passage of the [Andean] Cordillera, was so interesting to me as this week. It is by far the most remarkable area I ever examined.” In the Andes three years before, Darwin had found seashells at eight thou sand feet, convincing him that those mountains had risen from the sea, and he had been fascinated ever since with geological uplift and subsidence. Even as he walked Glen Roy, this fascination was leading Darwin to the subsidence theory of coral reef formation that Alexander Agassiz (just three years old at this point) would grapple with years later.

Here at Glen Roy, however, Darwin saw not subsidence but uplift. Specifically, he theorized that the entire valley had once been at or under sea level and that the three sets of terraces were former shores that rimmed a saltwater sea or inlet as the land rose in three subsequent surges. This complemented a larger theory of changing sea levels that Lyell had posited to explain phenomena such as erratic boulders, moraines, and other out-of-place items, and it fit nicely into Darwin’s own obsession with rising landforms.

Darwin promptly wrote a ninety-page paper detailing this theory. It was his first paper of length-the first time he’d exercised his theoretical imagination and published the results-and it brought him much satisfaction and recognition. The Royal Society accepted the paper early in 1839 and elected him a fellow a week later. The paper secured his entry, independent of his Beagle investigations, into the upper strata of British science.

A year later, Louis Agassiz toured Britain for the third time to examine fish fossils and talk Eiszeit. On visiting Glen Roy he declared that it was not a raised seabed but a valley that had been blocked at its ends by ice during an ice age, creating a freshwater lake that left shorelines (the “roads”) as it drained in three warming events-somewhat like a filled tub with its plug thrice pulled and replaced. This explanation had roots only marginally less speculative than Darwin’s, rising as much from Louis’s belief in glaciation as Darwin’s did from his belief in uplift. However, Louis cited substantial evidence that Darwin had either underplayed or overlooked-a complete absence of marine fossils, for instance, which Darwin had noted but discounted, and signs of ancient outgoing streams that Darwin had missed.

Louis’s better-supported argument triumphed, though only after a debate that burned hot at first and then flared sporadically over the next two decades. The originality of Agassiz’s argument impressed everyone immediately, but in Britain it initially convinced only a few. Fortunately for Louis, these few included some of the country’s most prominent scientists, such as William Buckland, an Oxford professor and Lyell mentor who wrote two papers supporting Agassiz’s view. Others came around more slowly. Lyell and Sedgwick, for example, initially resisted Louis’s Glen Roy account even though they generally accepted his ice age theory. But as observations made by other investigators in the subsequent twenty years seemed to sup port Agassiz’s explanation over Darwin’s, most of the doubters, including Lyell, came to agree with him about Glen Roy. Darwin eventually did as well.

Louis’s insight at Glen Roy accelerated acceptance of his ice age theory. It also greatly distressed Darwin, who watched in agony as his first child, as he once called his Glen Roy theory, stumbled and fell. He suffered less from shame of error than from horror at the realization that he had speculated too freely. An imaginative theorist all his life, Darwin was at this stage still learning to rigorously test his creative ideas. (He was thirty when he published his Glen Roy paper.) His shorter coral reef paper, presented in 1837 to the Geological Soci- ety, had met little criticism precisely because he had tested it sharply against the available evidence before publishing. (It helped too that though he had seen only a few coral reefs, few Brits had seen more.) Now he feared that he had grown too bold. He feared in particular that he had too readily dismissed a shortage of supporting evidence, such as the lack of marine fossils at Glen Roy, as a meaningless absence. At a time when he was struggling to test and develop his theory of natural selection-a view he knew would be profoundly con troversial-the thought that he was using faulty logic terrified him. He had left himself out on a limb, and Louis Agassiz had sawn it off. What faults might he be overlooking in his nascent evolution theory?

These doubts did not hit Darwin all at once. They accumulated sickeningly over a twenty-year span. For a time, he tried to fend Agassiz off, arguing that while both his seashore theory and Agassiz’s glacial-lake theory had problems, his had fewer. But as most scientists moved to Agassiz’s view, Darwin slowly let go of his theory. After two decades he finally surrendered completely when a comprehensive review by the respected geologist Thomas Jamieson found for Agassiz. Even then, he wrote Lyell, he was pained: “I am smashed to atoms about Glen Roy… My paper was one long gigantic blunder. Eheu! Eheu!”

Years before, however, he had surrendered to Agassiz on the larger point of glaciation, and as often occurs, the defeat taught more to the loser than the winner. In 1842, at the time Louis was turning England into an ice house, Darwin had undergone a sort of Eiszeit conversion when he took a long walk in Wales and, in an area he had walked a decade before with Adam Sedgwick, saw signs of glaciation everywhere. He was stunned that he could have missed them before. “Eleven years ago I spent a whole day in [this] valley,” he wrote a friend, “where yesterday everything but the ice of the glacier was palpably clear to me, and then I saw nothing but plain water and bare rock.” As he later recalled in his autobiography, “Neither [Sedgwick nor I] saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena around us [on the earlier trip]; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that… a house burned down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley.”

Thus Louis’s glacial theories brought Darwin an epiphany on one hand and, several years later, humiliation on the other. These were the first in a strange, irony-laced series of encounters between the minds and legacies of these two men, and their reactions to these early clashes are revealing. For Darwin, the explanatory power of Louis’s larger glacier theory, witnessed so starkly on his Wales walk, confirmed a vital lesson: Productive observation actually rises from sound theory-not the opposite, as Louis would assert. A mere idea could transform the world, making palpable features and dynamics previously hidden. Later, Darwin’s long, slow defeat on Glen Roy led him to test his theories more rigorously and hold himself to a higher level of proof. This lesson, added to his habitual caution, doubtless contributed to his twenty-three-year hesitation in publishing his theory of evolution. But both the Glen Roy reversal and the revelations he saw in the Eiszeit hypothesis helped Darwin forge the distinctive theoretical approach-imaginative in spawning ideas, rigorous in testing them-that let him develop the evolution theory that would negate much of Louis’s work.

Thus Darwin learned both boldness and caution from his encounters with Louis’s ice age work. Louis took from Glen Roy an opposite lesson: He felt emboldened to push his speculative theories ever further. At Glen Roy Darwin had stumbled, collected himself, and adjusted his gait. Louis had sprung across a valley and landed safely. He would soon put so much faith in his leaps that even when his support was delusory, he would land and feel solid ground.

4

When he wasn’t sorting fish or visualizing glaciers, Louis headed an increasingly busy household. On December 17, 1835, with Louis in the thick of Poissons, Cécile gave birth to Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz-the first name coming from Cécile’s brother, Rodolphe from Louis’s father.*

Relatively little from Alex’s early years has survived his move to the United States and (later) his own careful tending of family history. Alexander never wrote a memoir, and as an adult he actively sheltered himself and his family from the sort of scrutiny his father had invited. His surviving letters reveal little of his personal history for while there are many he destroyed those more intimate. His let terpress letter books have crucial pages razored out, and the papers lack diaries and letters mentioned elsewhere. At some point he (and perhaps his secretary and heirs) did a lot of cleaning up. However, enough descends via his childhood family and its many hangers-on to reveal a child who inherited his father’s sharp intelligence and taste for work but who lacked his father’s ebullient confidence that all would work out. For Alex, things usually didn’t.

Things started well enough. Cécile, a healthy twenty-seven when she bore Alex, was still infatuated with Louis and the life she was establishing with him in Neuchâtel. Though less sophisticated than the Heidelberg area in which she was raised, Neuchâtel, in the heart of Swiss chocolate-, wine-, and clock-making country, was the cultural and market center for the surrounding region of valley farms and vineyards. Across the town’s namesake lake stood the Alps; behind it rose the Juras. Like her native Carlsruhe, Neuchâtel was a physically beautiful place, and Cécile likely thought she could re create there the happiness her parents had at home. Her parents were highly educated and cultured. Her father, the postmaster general of the grand duchy of Baden, was a distinguished amateur geologist who had installed an extensive library, mineral collection, and natural history laboratory in their home, and Cécile had grown up happily with three brothers with whom she explored, read, and sang. A gifted musician and artist, she now found herself married to a prominent young scientist in another small, picturesque city. It remained only to create a convivial mix of family, art, and science.

She began by assuming some of the drawing duties for Louis’s Poissons and other publications. She had done botanical illustrations for her brother for several years, and as her grandson would later observe, she now brought “an unusual combination of delicacy and vigor” to the illustration of Louis’s fish and marine fossils. Decades later, her daughter Ida was looking at some of these original drawings at the British Museum (which had purchased them during one of the many times that Louis needed cash) when the curator who was showing her the drawings remarked, “I noticed that those signed by the artist ‘C.A.’ are much the most beautiful.”

Though Alex’s arrival interrupted this work, the baby gave Cécile immense pleasure. By this time she had begun to miss Germany acutely, and her occasional visits there only sharpened the pang. The foreign world she occupied in Neuchâtel, of Swiss sensibility, French language, and full of scientists and students trying to impress her husband, began to seem provincial. She especially missed music. Alex gave her the chance to remedy some of this, for he was hers to form. From his youngest days she taught him drawing, music, and German, determined that he grow up cultured.

Alex, however, also felt a strong pull from his father’s world. Collecting small animals thrills most young children; Alex’s interest was further focused and fired by Louis’s enthusiasm and the growing “scientific factory” he was creating in the house. By the time Alex was born, the Agassizes had moved from the apartment the university gave them into a house that was increasingly devoted to lab and work space. With Louis and his assistants constantly unpacking and working up specimens, the place offered an ever-changing display of oddities that must have fascinated young Alex. He soon became an avid young collector. A cousin later remembered seeing, in a drawer in Alex’s wardrobe, a collection of mysterious creatures, plants, and parts thereof, all preserved in small bottles. If a playmate got too near the wardrobe, Alex would cry, “Please don’t touch my anatomy!”

The house hosted a rotating cast of intriguing figures. The artist Joseph Dinkel, a warmhearted, thoughtful, and entertaining soul, had lived with the family since before Alex’s birth. Like a combination of mother and father but issuing fewer demands, Dinkel shared with Alex the intricate pleasures of both the specimens he was drawing and the drawings themselves. Another artist, Jacques Burkhardt, soon joined the operation and, like Dinkel, befriended Alex and his sisters. (Burkhardt would eventually move with Louis to America.) Alex spent much time with both these men and later attributed his great drawing talent to them as well as to his mother.

This cast expanded as Alex began to study the world in earnest. A secretary, Edward Desor, joined the operation in 1836, and Karl Schimper, a close college friend of both Louis’s and Alexander Braun’s, arrived in 1837 to teach at a nearby college and worked frequently with Louis until 1840. Though these men distracted Louis, Alex enjoyed the clear, devoted attention of his mother, so their presence was likely more that of kindly uncles than unwelcome competitors.

This core group included one of the stranger characters in nine tenth-century science, Amanz Gressly Gressly a Swiss six years older than Louis, had studied geology and took a special interest in paleontology. When he joined Louis in the mid-i830s, he had just developed what would prove his most lasting scientific contribution, the theory of stratigraphicfacies. This was the recognition that most geological strata, or layers, contain within their lateral expanses distinct zones, or facies, that differ according to the environmental conditions present at the times they were formed. One key difference was what sort of fossils each facies contained. This discovery held tremendous value, for it enabled a knowledgeable person like Gressly to match particular communities of fossils with particular facies, greatly aiding the classification and aging of the fossils.

When Gressly, painfully shy, came to Louis with his still unpublished facies paper, Louis saw instantly how much Gressly’s knowledge would add to his classification and paleontological work. He promptly published the paper, bought Gressly’s specimen collection, and hired him. Gressly would later help engineer many of the alpine train tunnels. But in his years with Agassiz, he was completely absorbed in finding fossils and solving the puzzle of what facies they represented. He seemed to care about nothing else. The man was ever outdoors. Leaving in spring, he would spend months at a time tramping all over the Juras and the Alps, unheard from until he would return one day to empty his numerous, large pockets (he often wore several shirts as well as an overcoat) of the rare and beautiful fossils he had chiseled from the mountains. When traveling he usually lodged with farmers. They learned to receive him gladly, for in the course of dinner he could tell them where to drill a well or find a spring or unearth clay, stone, or gravel. After dinner he would retire to a spare bed, couch, or even the barn. He always slept in his clothes, shoes included. He spent almost nothing. Louis, usually cashless himself, would sometimes scare up a few francs to send Gressly off with, and Gressly would live for months on what others might spend in a week- end. Once, emptying his pockets after a two-month trek, Gressly pulled from the bottom of one pocket, with a surprised exclamation, a few coins Agassiz had given him before his departure-and which in eight weeks he had never thought to pull out and spend. While in Neuchâtel he stayed at a third-rate inn run by the sister of the artist Burkhardt, in a “small bedroom, poorly furnished” as Agassiz’s col league Marcou later put it, “which soon became a true pandemonium of the most sordid kind.” This odd wanderer was a great hit with Alex and his sisters. “Like a child, as he was all his life,” wrote Marcou, “he played with the children, making cocks and boats and dancing frogs out of pieces of old almanacs or newspapers.”

With characters like that around-and with sisters born when he was two and then four-a curious boy like Alex was seldom bored. He also had his formal education to absorb, attending classes at the Neuchâtel Gymnasium; studying German, Latin, and French; learning drawing from Dinkel and Burkhardt and his mother; and taking the violin lessons his mother insisted on. He sometimes accompanied his father or his assistants on field outings so that he could fatten his own collections. When he was four, his summers came to include trips to the Aar glacier, where Louis had established the “Hôtel de Neuchâtel,” a field camp from which he and his retinue studied glaciers. An early lithograph shows young Alex being ferried up to the camp in a basket atop a guide’s back. Through the rest of his life he liked walking, preferring it to any transport save horseback.

This childhood, full of stimulation and entertainment and engaging study, can appear idyllic through the prism of two centuries, our romanticized view of preindustrial Europe, and the filter of family history. But even by the early 1840s the gloss was starting to wear off the Agassizes’ life in Neuchâtel. Louis’s profligate spending of time, money, and his family’s privacy had eroded his marriage. Though opposites may attract, they don’t necessarily thrive in the same environment. Cécile, quieter and more private than Louis, resented her husband’s absences (for he traveled frequently to examine specimens, lecture, and hobnob) and the constant presence of his retinue. By 1840 she shared their house with at least five people out side the immediate family-artists Dinkel and Burkhardt, secretary Desor, assistant Karl Vogt, and Louis’s mother, Rose (for Adolphe had died), who lived there full-time; with many others who stayed for a few nights or weeks; and with a stream of daytime and evening visitors-students, colleagues, admirers. Tired of paying others to print his monographs, Louis had started a publishing company, and that too demanded his attention and (though originally meant to make money) drained funds. Neither her home nor her money, not even her own dinner table, seemed to belong to Cécile. Dinner typically included not only all houseguests but anyone who happened to drop by near mealtime. The table often hosted more than a dozen of Louis’s assistants, colleagues, protégés, and admirers, and they frequently stayed late into the evening. Quiet by nature, Cécile could hardly get in a word with her husband, and the talk at her table was what her guests rather than she desired. She particularly despised Edward Desor, Louis’s secretary, who she believed took advantage of Louis, pushing him to overextend himself financially and profession ally. She also disliked Karl Vogt, who joined Desor at dinner in slinging off-color jokes and antireligious jibes that Cécile (rather devout, and trying to raise three young children) found offensive.

This was not exactly the cultured harmony of music, work, and familial collaboration she had imagined. Her house was a zoo, and she could scarcely get the keeper’s attention. She pleaded with Louis to scale back. His mother and brother did likewise. But Louis was not to be reached. He only further expanded his activities, taking on ever more projects and traveling frequently to study or lecture. Summers he was gone altogether, hot on the trail of the ice age.

Louis was in fact now overdrawn professionally, financially, and in the goodwill of friends and colleagues. His love of lecturing and of the big idea had led him to test, in his presentations around Europe, an early version of the “Plan of Creation” lectures he would later give in America-his own elaboration of Cuvierian special creationism. This new focus struck some, especially his new, empirically minded British colleagues, as an unfortunate departure from his more rigorous taxonomy and geology. Lyell was among those who found his creationist vision a stretch. On hearing Agassiz’s lecture on the topic, Lyell reportedly told Darwin that he found it “so delightful, that he could not help all the time wishing it was true.”

Closer to home, Louis’s years of overspending on staff, travel, and the hemorrhaging publishing operation had led him to borrow repeatedly from family (including Cécile’s), friends, and his benefice- tors in town. As his debts mounted high enough for even the infatuated to see, those funds dried up. By 1845 he faced sharp deficits with no way to pay them.

He had also alienated several friends, assistants, and colleagues who felt he had used their ideas without proper credit. Most of these disputes concerned the ice age theory that Agassiz had so successfully adopted. The first aggrieved party was Karl Schimper, who left Neuchâtel in a huff in 1840 because he thought Agassiz had inadequately acknowledged the contributions (including the term Eiszeit) he had made to the ice age theory in their many long discussions about it. A year later Agassiz infuriated Charpentier, who had introduced Louis to glacial studies (and hosted him that first summer), by publishing his major volume on the ice ages a mere few weeks before Charpentier published his; Charpentier received Louis’s published book as he was reviewing his own final page proofs. Though Louis acknowledged him in the book, Charpentier was livid that Agassiz did not grant him the courtesy of first publication. It probably didn’t help that Louis had already claimed the subject as his own in his many lectures around Europe. Then in 1844 Karl Vogt broke with Agassiz because he felt Louis wasn’t giving him enough credit on publications Vogt had helped write.*

I have seen the being I loved most, who alone gave me some interest in this arid land, slowly decline. For four long years my brother had suffered … [In the end] he died … with a strength of character and a serenity of mind worthy of the greatest admiration. It is cruel to see so noble an intelligence struggle … against physical destruction. We are told that in great grief we should turn with redoubled energy to the study of nature. The advice is easy to give; but for a long time even the wish for distraction is wanting.

Louis responded, “I cannot express to you my pleasure in reading your letter. … To know that I have occupied your thoughts a moment, especially in days of trial and sorrow such as you have had to bear, raises me in my own eyes, and redoubles my hope for the future. And just now such encouragement is particularly cheering under the difficulties which I meet in completing my task in England. I have now been here nearly two months…” He continues with two pages of what he has been up to and hopes to do next, and not another word about Humboldt or his brother.

Though Cécile was glad to see Vogt leave, it was not enough. In the early spring of 1845, convinced that Louis would not curb his excesses as long as Desor was around to encourage expansionary habits, she told him that either Desor went or she did. Convinced that he couldn’t escape his financial jam without Desor, Louis refused to fire him. Cécile made good on her threat. She took the girls-leaving ten-year-old Alex in the local academy-and moved to her brother’s house in Carlsruhe.

The dissolution of this once burgeoning home can be seen as a sudden explosion of Alex’s world, and perhaps in fact he never saw it coming. The accounts that have been passed down through the Agassiz family leave it hard to tell. Yet even the thin, laundered version that has survived shows the residue of great distress. One of the few stories about Alex from the last months his father and mother were together, passed off by his own son George in Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz as a boyish prank, evinces a ferocious hostility toward Louis. For in a most spectacular and personally risky way, Alex struck at Louis’s most important benefactor.

Neuchâtel’s governor at the time served the king of Prussia, who at the behest of Humboldt had funded the Neuchâtel job and to whom Louis had applied, even as things began to unravel in Neuchâ-tel, for funding for the trip that would take him to the United States. Louis both enjoyed and greatly needed the favor of both king and governor, and he courted the governor at every opportunity.

Alex regarded the governor less fondly, and in an escalation that his own son credits implausibly to politics, he expressed this dislike in a way that badly embarrassed his father. As George relates it, the king’s Neuchâtel governor was

a retired Prussian general, and a martinet who liked to show his authority in the smallest details, [and] was so lacking in the rudiments of humor as to complain to Louis Agassiz that his little son was not saluting him politely, and Alex was punished. Meeting the Governor on the street the next day, the boy saluted him in the most abject possible manner. The Governor complained again, whereupon the elder Agassiz, much incensed, gave his son a sound thrashing… Not content with this, the Governor singled out his diminutive adversary at a
school celebration and held him up for reproof before a large audience.
When it was Alexander’s turn to receive his prizes from the Governor, he was so angry that he refused them with scorn, turned his back on the representative of the King, and … walked out of the room. This led to further difficulties at home. Infuriated at the Governor’s treatment, this youthful patriot collected a band of confederates of his own age, stormed the [Governor’s] castle on the night of a large dinner party at which his father was present, and smashed all the windows of the state dining-hall. Louis Agassiz, suspecting the instigator of this out rage, rushed home, but found his son safely in bed and apparently asleep.

He would not sleep there long. When Cécile moved out a few months later, Alex moved from home to a boarding school in Neuchâtel run by a cleric, Frederic Godet. Louis, meanwhile, began dismantling his scientific factory, selling off the publishing operation and its assets and laying off some of his retinue but retaining Desor, Dinkel, and Burkhardt. Within a few weeks Alex got the news that his father had indeed won funding from the king for what was to be a two-year collecting trip throughout North America. Louis’s departure dragged on, however, as he had much to clean up before he left-classes to finish, debts to rearrange, publications to complete, and groundwork to lay for what would prove a permanent move to the United States.

Alex watched this long leavetaking from the boarding school. Though placing his son decisively would seem a high priority for a father departing overseas, Alex was still at Godet’s in March 1846 when Louis left Neuchâtel for good. It was not until the following school year that Alex joined his mother in Germany. Of the intervening year we know little. He stayed at Godet’s boarding school, and he may have traveled a few times to visit his mother and sisters, first in Carlsruhe, then in Freiburg after Cécile moved there to follow her brother, who had taken a post as director of the botanical gardens there. After Cécile and Alex’s sisters Ida and Pauline had settled in, Alex finally joined them sometime in the second half of 1847.

*Sedgwick was not uniformly impressed, however. In the same letter in which he praised Poissons, he complained that Louis sometimes speculated too freely:

Agassiz joined us at Dublin, and read a long paper to our section [the geological division of a conference].

But what think you? Instead of teaching us what we wanted to know, and giving us of the overflowing of his abundant ichthyologic wealth, he read a long, stupid, hypothetical dissertation on geology, drawn from the depths of his ignorance. … I hope we shall, before long, be able to get this moon shine out of his head, or at least prevent him from publishing it.

Adam Sedgwick to Charles Lyell, 20 Sept. 1835, Life and Letters of Sedgwick, vol. 1 (Cam bridge, 1890), p. 44, as quoted in Jules Marcou, Life, Letters, and Works of Louis Agassiz(New York: Woodworth, 1915).

*Alex’s actual legal name is uncertain. Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz is the name by which Alex went all his life and under which he immigrated to America and later took citizenship. But late in life he found among old family papers a birth certificate, apparently valid, naming him Alexander Rodolphe Albert Agassiz.

*Some of Louis’s admirers stuck with him in the face of astonishing insults and trials; for them his magnetism

apparently matched his boundless self-absorption. This applied even to those who recognized his faults in general. Humboldt, for instance, who was generous to Agassiz, often warned Louis of the dangers of overextending himself, of “literary self-love,” and of neglecting his home life; yet he overlooked a self-centeredness that led Louis to all but ignore one of Humboldt’s greatest personal losses. Only two years after Humboldt had helped Louis in Paris and secured him the Neuchâtel job, he wrote Louis a distraught letter telling, in most affecting terms, of the loss of his brother William: