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

Part I

Chapter 5. Fixity

ALEXANDER AGASSIZ assumed his duties at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in the spring of 1860, at the age of twenty-four, and spent the next decade or so as fruitfully as anyone his age could reasonably ask. He married well and happily; fathered three children; made himself rich; and established himself as a scientist of real importance. He was not the wunderkind his father had been. Yet despite immense distractions on every front, he managed not only to emerge from Louis’s shadow without alienating him (a feat accomplished by only a few Agassiz protégés) but to reconcile his father’s best methods with the seemingly incompatible perspective of a new scientific era. This last achievement was far more radical than even Alex realized.

He began by returning to zoology. Writing up his work on Pacific perch and starfish had revived his passion for taxonomy, and he applied himself to it energetically as soon as he got home from Panama. He spent much of that summer of 1859 and many thereafter at the seaside cottage in Nahant that Liz Cary owned with her sister, where Alex and Louis had converted a small shed into a field lab. Alex kept a dory in a bight nearby. In the mornings he would drag the heavy boat across the sand and launch it through the surf, then row out past the breakers or into coves so he could dive for sea urchins and starfish and scoop up medusae and other plankton. He particularly liked gathering these small creatures that float at the cur- rent’s mercy: translucent pteropods, or “winged snails”; tiny, ghost like ctenophores resembling minuscule jellyfish; and the embryos of starfish, urchins, and anemones. Bobbing in immense numbers near the surface, these animals usually go unnoticed, for they offer but flecks to the naked eye. Alex collected them with a silk dip net so he could watch them, alive and awriggle, under a microscope or in a glass bowl over a light table. Summers he collected busily, working the boat in the morning and examining and classifying his finds in the afternoon. He filled notebooks with observations, measurements, and exquisite sketches and watercolors.

Back in Cambridge for autumn and winter, he expanded these notes into the papers with which he made his first marks in the scientific world.*With titles like “Function of the Pedicellariae,” “On the Young Stages of a Few Annelids,” and “The Mode of Development of the Marginal Tentacles of the Free Medusa of Some Hydroids,” these were thorough, painstaking papers bespeaking excruciatingly persistent microscope work. They described with scrupulous accuracy, and they occasionally divulged findings that excited other biologists. In “Function of the Pedicellariae,” for instance, Alex revealed his discovery that the tiny, tulip-shaped stalks growing between the spines of sea urchins, thought to be mere ornament, served a function after all: They cleaned, passing debris in bucket-brigade fashion off the animal. (They were later found also to contain a stinging poison that repelled predators.) Work this demanding (some would say tedious) suits few. Alex loved it. It met his compulsion to organize and confirmed his conviction, learned from his father’s rhetoric if not his work, that the most meaningful knowledge springs from meticulous observation.

He also enjoyed, most of the time, his job cataloging the museum’s starfish and sea urchins, classifying them into known taxa and crying a small eureka at the infrequent new find. This was taxonomy at its most pleasurable: precise, protracted work revealing an accumulating pattern and the occasional discovery.

His home life echoed this, taking an increasing order leavened by the unexpected. In the fall of 1860 he finally married Anna Russell.

Anna’s father, George Russell, was a prominent textile merchant, and her mother was sister to Quincy Adams Shaw, who with his cousin Francis Parkman had published The Oregon Trail and who with his siblings and cousins would inherit the vast Shaw and Parkman for tunes. Anna’s sister Mimi, meanwhile, married Alex’s friend and benefactor Theo Lyman. Theo had actually played matchmaker between his wife’s sister and his good friend, and his desire that Alex and Anna marry, along with his wish to see his friend pursue work he liked, had helped motivate his contribution to the museum of Alex’s fifteen-hundred-dollar salary. (Alex never felt completely comfort able with this arrangement during the seven years it was in effect, but he accepted it because Theo reassured him, truthfully on all points, that the contribution was really to the museum and to science, not to Alex; that Alex more than earned it; and that Theo “had to give money away somewhere” and felt the money’s departure not a whit.) In addition, Alex’s sister Pauline married Quincy Adams Shaw him self (Anna’s uncle); and Quincy’s brother Gardner in turn married Theo Lyman’s sister Cora. Alex’s place in this spiderweb arrangement is dizzying to contemplate. By marrying Anna he made himself brother-in-law to his best friend; brother-in-law to his wife’s (and his new) uncle; brother-in-law to his best friend’s wife (Mimi); and, naturally, a cousin to himself a couple times over and at least once removed. More important, he was now related, in some cases several times over, to three of Boston’s wealthiest families: the Russells, the Lymans, and the Shaws.

But though money lay all about, Alex and Anna remained deter mined to live on what Alex could earn. They made their first home in a set of rooms at Louis and Elizabeth’s big house on Quincy Street, just across from the Harvard campus and a half mile from the museum. The girls’ school was in its last couple of years, and while Alex sidestepped further teaching duties, the school was one more activity, along with the many visitors, colleagues, protégés, hangers-on, and sycophants, that made Louis’s house, no matter how large, feel eternally full. Even so, the big, rambling home allowed Alex and Anna a small apartment of their own.

Eighteen months after marrying, in July 1862, Anna gave birth to a son, George Russell Agassiz. Another son, Maximilian, would follow in 1866, and a third, Rodolphe, in 1871. Despite living with their in-laws, the young couple grew to be quite affectionate. Anna’s brother, Harry, reported to their sister Mimi after a six-week stay that “Alex is better the more you see of him and Annie seems to think so too… When they were engaged they were icebergs to each other, compared to … now.”

This assessment is confirmed by letters of other relatives and friends, as well as Anna’s, that consistently portray a marriage that must have brought an exhilarating sense of both expansion and safety to the much-buffeted Alex. Anna, four years younger than Alex, greatly admired his intelligence and steadiness while gently challenging his caution and reserve and encouraging his efforts to find his own place in the world. Likewise, Alex seems to have been a solicitous and affectionate husband who respected Anna’s independence of thought and the persistent but politic ways in which she held her own (even asserting some relatively liberal leanings) in a household headed by two dominating, politically conservative personalities.

Alex also took growing pleasure and strength from his friendship with his brother-in-law Theo. It’s probably hard to overstate the emotional and practical importance of this kinship. The money Theo provided-the museum salary and later some crucial loans- was the least of it. The two had become good friends as undergraduates, then grew closer over the years as they each took advanced degrees in zoology in the late 1850s (spending much time together at the Nahant lab) and worked together as curators and de facto man agars of the new museum. (Alex handled the sea urchins and starfish, while Theo looked after their close cousins the brittle stars. Both spent time tending the museum’s administration and finances.) This common history gave Theo an appreciation of Alex’s position and difficulties unrivaled by anyone’s except perhaps Anna’s. Being married to sisters only tightened the bond. And as Theo esteemed Alex’s intelligence, discipline, and gruff generosity, so Alex found in Theo (as in Anna, and as Louis had found in Cécile Braun and then Liz Cary) an example of a life more open to emotional and cultural pleasures than that of the cloistered researcher.

Theo thus became one of the few intimates Alex ever allowed himself, a role enhanced by his place outside the immediate family. Even early in their friendship, when both men were in their twenties and starting families, Alex would confide in Theo as in no one else.

Later, when they shared cruelly similar losses, Alex would lean on Theo, and Theo-more garrulous and introspective and, unlike Alex, a devoted diarist and letter writer-would express much that Alex could not bear to articulate.

In these early days of the 1860s, however, their conversation and correspondence tended toward their shared family and their labors at the museum. It also covered, unavoidably, the Civil War. Though the war affected Alex less than many men his age, it hardly went unfelt. New England had long been the region most opposed to slavery, and many Bostonians were radicalized in 1856, when native son and U.S. senator Charles Sumner, who had enraged many Southerners with his denunciations of slavery (and who, incidentally, had been courting Liz Cary when Louis Agassiz showed up), suffered a near fatal beating by South Carolina representative Preston Brooks. Brooks, finding Sumner working at his desk on the Senate floor one evening, attacked him with a brass-headed cane, striking him more than thirty times before the bloody and unconscious Sumner, his legs trapped beneath the bolted-down desk, uprooted the desk and fell back onto the floor. When Southerners hailed Brooks as a hero (he received scores of canes as gifts), Bostonians concluded the South would stop at nothing to defend and expand slavery. Several subsequent incidents in which fugitive slaves were captured in Boston and returned south sharpened Bostonians’ disgust. When war broke out in April 1861, many, including members of Boston’s aristocracy rushed to answer Lincoln’s call for volunteers.

Throughout the war Alex agonized over whether to join them. Many of his former classmates served, as did several of his acquaintances, friends, and family. Theo, for instance, though he first completed an eighteen-month sojourn in Europe that he started just before the war broke, enlisted on his return in 1863, eventually serving as an aide to General George Meade and publishing a well-regarded book about Meade’s Virginia campaigns. Anna’s cousin Robert Gould Shaw served in the Massachusetts Second Regiment and then took first command of the famed black regiment, the Fifty-fourth, and died leading a charge against Fort Wagner. Henry Lee Higginson, a childhood friend of Alex’s who was wounded in 1862, proposed to Alex’s sister Ida in 1863 and married her that December before returning to battle. And Anna’s brother Harry was taken pris- oner for a time (and thought dead for a few days) in 1862, and when released spent six weeks with Alex and Anna at Quincy Street before returning to the front. A number of other family friends had sons and brothers who did not come home. The war felt near indeed.

Surrounded by those who served, Alex several times nearly enlisted, particularly in 1864, a low point of the war for the North. But in the end-and partly because the museum had already suffered so many losses to enlistment-he heeded his father’s call to tend the museum. Louis, notwithstanding some racist views he shared with many Southerners (and not a few Northerners), was, like many conservative Northerners, ardently pro-Union once the war started. Yet he felt that his own patriotic duty was to save science from being a war casualty. He vigorously preached the need at such times to move forward with science-and, naturally, with vital projects such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He thus managed to convince the state legislature to help fund the museum’s expansion despite the war.

It was in managing this expansion that Alex saw a duty he could not neglect. As ever, Louis had more plans than he could execute, more promises than he could keep, and more specimens arriving than the staff and students (who were drafted as part-time curators) could process. It fell to Alex, as de facto manager of the museum’s day-to-day operations, to compensate for these excesses. He scram bled for money, arranged specimen swaps in lieu of payment, and sometimes embarrassedly returned specimens the museum could not afford. He felt (with good reason) that if he left for the war, the museum would implode.

Louis wanted the Museum of Comparative Zoology to be not only a center of study that would advance knowledge but a place of public enlightenment that would diffuse that knowledge through educational displays. This dual-purpose museum would require many, many specimens. The scholars and taxonomists would need their own sets-ideally, several specimens showing different stages of development of each taxa, so that several scholars could simultaneously make comparative studies. The museum displays would require another full set showing each stage of development for each species. Accordingly, Louis spent much of the 1850s and early 1860s soliciting specimens from collectors all over North America-everyone from professionals at academic centers to amateur naturalists working out west. They had responded energetically, sending thousands of dead animals in boxes, barrels, and jars. Now that he had a museum, a budget (no matter how overstretched), and a store of specimens he could swap for others, Louis solicited yet more specimens.

From Alex’s first day of work, then, he, Theo, and the other curators and students faced a daunting backlog of corpses that awaited unpacking, cleaning, classification, description, and preservation. As they were often packed in cheap whiskey, this was a chore that grew old quickly. More arrived weekly.

It was Alex’s job to oversee this administrative and curatorial work. Struggling to impose order on a rapidly expanding situation while constantly fighting rearguard actions to keep the budget from glowing red, he often found himself under great strain. Theo’s departure for Europe in early 1861 made this lonely task more so. Across the Atlantic he shared his woes. In June of that year, asking Theo to keep this to himself, he said he had discovered four thousand dollars’ worth of storage and display cases still unpaid for, and that fall he wrote a letter “blue to the very depths” about his frustrations at the museum. A few months later he turned from a long passage about the war to “a subject not less disgusting, the Museum,” and after a plaint about staffing inefficiencies and slow progress on curatorial work declared,

When I speak to father about it I can get no satisfaction. He has a thousand excuses always ready … so that all my attempts at introducing any kind of system … have most signally failed… [Meanwhile] he is killing himself by inches with the Museum, his book, the lectures he has to give for money to keep the machine going. … I tried all I could to make matters easier for him but all my efforts are wasted. … I must say it is rather discouraging not to be able to do any good and to be obliged to see things going on the way they do, when with very little delay everything could be put on a good footing.

Such despair visits anyone struggling to curb a squanderous superior. For Alex, with his love of order, it clouded an otherwise happy time. Though he took satisfaction in what progress he could make organizing the museum, his father’s excesses would gradually drive him to such exasperation that he would rage and then grow blue- and then distance himself from it, declaring that it was “not worth it” to worry. For a time, he would let it roll off, then mounting frustration or a crisis would again make the situation seem untenable.

Alex was hardly the only underling frustrated by Louis. One of the museum’s biggest problems in its first years was a swelling discontent among Louis’s students. Though Louis could spark early enthusiasm like no one else, his authoritarianism would soon emerge to smother the flame. With the museum’s founding in 1859, he had brought in a new crop of particularly promising students, his first, other than Alex and Theo, of doctorate caliber. However, they entered not a formal graduate-school track with established requirements pursued under a faculty’s collective guidance (a system then still under development) but a master-apprentice arrangement modeled on the academies of Europe. A student’s education, directed almost entirely by his mentor, would advance not by set criteria but at his master’s discretion.

Louis’s students soon found that their inspiring, charming, and generous master could be overbearing and capricious. Even more discouraging, he acknowledged progress reluctantly. He scolded and berated, changed the requirements for advancement, and expanded the students’ curatorial duties, further slowing their progress. Some times he failed to credit students who had authored significant portions of works published under his name. He usually found their own papers not quite worthy of publication and often found the students themselves not quite ready for graduation or recommendation for positions elsewhere. Louis also badly hurt his reputation among his students during this period by resisting the efforts of Henry Clark, a former student and longtimeaide whom he had recently made an assistant professor, to receive authorial credit for extensive passages he researched and wrote for Louis’s monumental Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. Clark grew so frus- trated that he published a “Claim for Scientific Property.” Louis responded by banning Clark from the museum and squeezing him out of the Harvard faculty. The episode suggested disturbing things for his more independent and motivated students.

Inevitably, some rebelled. As early as 1861, several students began arguing with Louis, demanding pay rather than just scholarships for their curatorial work and pressing him to publish their papers in the museum’s publications. (These oft-promised publications were repeatedly delayed by Louis’s chronic budget and time overextensions.) When he resisted, several published their papers elsewhere. One, Albert Bickmore, showing he had learned much from the master, solicited subscriptions to his papers from the same wealthy Bostonians Louis so often tapped for cash. (Several signed on before Louis discovered the scheme and squashed it.) Bickmore and a few others, despairing of ever getting Louis’s blessing to graduate, began putting out job feelers. Meanwhile, and most painful to Louis, some of the students began to badmouth him outside the museum’s once tight circle. They accused him of behaving dictatorially of treating students as assistants rather than as junior colleagues, and of practicing antiquated science. They even formed a secret club, the Society for the Protection of American Students from Foreign Professors, that was a combination scientific salon and kvetching parlor. Just four years before, most of its members had been infatuated founders of the Agassiz Zoological Club.

Louis learned of the secret society, of course, along with the publishing schemes, the job hunts, and the nasty talk. Over much of 1863 he bickered with the rebels individually and sometimes as a group. Their recalcitrance provoked several rages. Sometimes shouting, he reminded them that he had worked hard to gather a vast collection for their study; built a museum to house it; secured funds for scholarships and stipends-in short, had offered them every resource he could muster, including his own unrivaled expertise-and they had responded by defying, deceiving, and even taunting and belittling him. He pointed out that science was a vast field not learned overnight, that they were students and he the master, and that most of them were not yet qualified to publish on their own, much less take their place among the discipline’s mature practitioners. He accompanied these tirades with new, tighter rules of authorial control, specimen use, and publication permissions, forbidding, for example, the publication of any research done using the museum’s materials unless he gave his blessing.

These edicts were not much stricter in principle than most at similar institutions then or, for that matter, today. But the authoritarian tone Louis used in asserting them chafed. “Has anyone told you about the … Napoleonic-tyrannic-Papalistic set of regulations?” one student wrote to an assistant who had already defected. Within six months after the new rules went into effect, most of Louis’s brightest students-over half the total-had left. To his cha grin, most quickly landed jobs at other top institutions. Yale hired one. The newly founded Peabody Institute in Salem, Massachusetts (a threat in his own backyard, as Louis saw it), hired several others. Albert Bickmore, whom Louis had caught soliciting private sub scribers, went to New York and helped establish what became the American Museum of Natural History.

The student rebellion of 1863-1864 (also known as the “Salem secession,” for all the rebels who went to Salem’s Peabody Institute) left the Museum of Comparative Zoology a poorer, quieter place. The few students remaining were both less capable and less bold, and though Louis bid the rebels good riddance, Alexander recognized that the museum had lost valuable people. Professional curators took on much of the students’ work at the museum, a stabilizing move that Alex had long pressed for. But the students’ accumulated taxo-nomic expertise had departed with them, as did some of the place’s spirit. The dorm that hosted beerfueled philosophical discussions stood empty; the Agassiz Zoological Club met no more; and the sense of excited, youthful endeavor that had imbued the museum was permanently dampened. Nothing, Louis said later, ever pained him as much as this insurrection.

The uprising of 1863 and 1864 stung badly enough on Oedipal grounds. Louis might have wished to blame it on the disruptive spirit of wartime. But as he well knew, his students’ discontent was sharp ened not so much by the Civil War as by another war as momentous, if less bloody. For the years of the student rebellion coincided with those in which Louis fought most of his battle against Darwinism. His resistance destroyed his credibility among peers and knocked him from his perch as an idol of the young. Louis, exquisitely sensitive to his standing, felt the loss keenly.

As with his students, Louis’s stock among colleagues fell partly because they tired of his egotism and authoritarianism. But his col leagues lost respect primarily because his fight with Darwin exposed not just his megalomania but his unscientific science. In a way this was no fault of Louis’s, for he used methods and principles long considered sound. But Darwin’s theory caused an extensive reevaluation of what it meant to do good science-one that took decades to complete but that crystallized and created sharp effects quite abruptly like the revolution it was-and Louis showed himself unable or unwilling to adjust.

It meant everything, of course, that the theory prompting this reexamination directly addressed the subject on which Louis based his reputation. Darwin’s concept of species creation could hardly have contradicted Louis’s more thoroughly. Whereas Louis held that God had created all species exactly as we know them, whole and immutable, Darwin proposed that all species had descended from common ancestors through an evolutionary process that favored the individuals of each generation who happened to inherit the traits most advantageous for their time. Species were produced not by divine design but by opportunistic exploitation of chance advantages. God’s will, in short, had nothing to do with it, and there was no plan to speak of. We got here by dumb luck and ruthless competition.

Darwin’s evolutionary theory is actually a set of several key concepts. The most central and vital are that all species descend from a single common ancestor; that the number of species has multiplied in branching fashion as different varieties and populations have evolved into new species; and that the mechanism driving this change is natural selection-the “survival of the fittest” (or luckiest) individuals of each generation by virtue of the advantages granted by their genetic makeup. To oversimplify just slightly, one can view Darwin’s construct as a theory of evolution of multiple species via common descent by means of natural selection.

This set of ideas threatened not just the creationist theory of species origin of the 1850s but almost every key principle of what constituted good science. It could hardly have been more radical. The very idea that species changed, for instance, insulted the concept of essentialism, which held that nature’s variety could be sorted into categories distinguished by immutable essences. This view, central to Western science since Aristotle, saw variations within a species as imperfect reflections of that species’ essence, not as potential first steps toward new species. Though its grip was weakening, most scientists still saw essentialism as a foundation of zoology.

The central role of chance in Darwin’s theory also defied the principle of determinism, which holds that nature operates according to knowable laws that dictate outcomes in a manner at least theoretically predictable. The scientist’s task lay in identifying these laws. The biologist’s version was so-called physicalism, which held that even biological dynamics could be reduced to verifiable physical statements and formulas-that biology, in other words, operated according to laws as consistent and unambiguous as those of New tonian physics. Darwin offered a law that said while you might reconstruct evolution’s past, you could never predict its future.

Even the most basic statement of Darwin’s theory, that species change through natural causes, threatened all these principles. But the most radical and novel of his ideas, the theory of natural selection, posed a particularly vexing affront. Even today this concept’s brutally mechanistic nature makes it hard to swallow. We balk at its rejection of moral or teleological aim-at the idea that every form of life, including our own, is the result of random chance and opportunism. Darwin’s theory of natural selection insists that we exist not because we were meant to but because we happen to, or, to put a slightly more flattering gloss on it, because we and our ancestors happened to receive certain crucial advantages. To accept this goes against every part of our self-conception. The notion is also deeply blasphemous, for in removing God as the shaper of life, it forces the question of whether he even started it. Darwin himself, once a devout Christian but increasingly atheistic as he developed his theory, blanched at these implications. He said that recognizing them was “like confessing a murder.”

These conceptual challenges, along with the difficulty of fully describing the mechanism of natural selection without reference to Mendelian genetics (then yet to be developed), made natural selection the last part of Darwin’s evolutionary theory to be accepted. While Darwin’s argument for evolution by common descent converted virtually all scientists to those views within a decade, the “by means of natural selection” part of his theory took another eight decades to take hold. It’s that much more remarkable (and a testament to the power of his argument), then, that Darwin convinced his peers of evolution by common descent, for his theory of natural selection is really his trump card, providing the key missing part-a viable dynamic driving species change-whose absence had crippled previous evolutionary theories. Not until the 1930s, when the so-called “evolutionary synthesis” integrated Mendelian genetics (developed by Gregor Mendel in the 1860s but largely ignored until 1900) into general evolutionary theory, was the theory of natural selection widely accepted among biologists.

In the meantime, rejecting the natural-selection part of Darwin’s larger theory spared one from confronting the larger theory’s most odious, mechanistic aspect, for it left God a potential role. Many have taken this dodge both in Darwin’s time and since, accepting the first definition of “Darwinism” (the idea of evolution and common descent through largely natural means) while still assuming that God somehow directs the evolutionary process, either by manipulating it directly or by having created its laws of operation. An update of this same compromise makes it possible to believe in both God and natural (well, almost natural) selection; you simply figure that God somehow supplies, in untraceable ways, the variations or created their possibility.

Louis Agassiz, however, could hardly take such a straddle. Having preached long and loudly that species were direct, immutable creations of God, he could not allow the notion that all species descended, changing constantly by natural processes, from a com monancestor. Louis saw immediately that he must either destroy Darwin’s theory or retract his own. He was not about to retract. Besides, Louis Agassiz seemed genuinely incapable of absorbing Dar win’s theory. Though he claimed to have read Origin several times, he never wrote or said anything suggesting that he really understood the mechanistic process Darwin described. He was too imbued with the certainties of essentialism, determinism, and creationism to imagine even a God-directed, teleological version of evolution, much less a random, mechanistic one. For him, as for many of his time, the conceptual jump was too great.

Because he failed to absorb Darwin’s main arguments, Louis saw Darwin as merely another case of Lamarck warmed over. The debate over this theory, then, would be a rehash of Cuvier versus Geoffroy And Louis would triumph as decisively as Cuvier had.

Louis probably shouldn’t be blamed too harshly for his sclerotic resistance. In addition to carrying particularly heavy versions of his generation’s essentialist baggage, he was behorned by a larger dilemma confronting any Western scientist, that of integrating a love of order with the determination to see clearly and think logically. The two passions would seem to complement each other and often do. But the compulsion to parse can lead us to impose a false order that warps our vision and dulls our thinking. Who has not falsely seen the familiar in the strange, the desired in the unwanted? The perching warbler transforms, under increasing light, into a dull leaf; the distant mountains reduce to clouds; the friend in the crowd, turning, becomes a stranger. So an idea offering order can impose one false. Louis’s and Cuvier’s creationism, Naturphilosophies archetypal hierarchy, the more general principle of essentialism-any ultimately untestable theory asserting that nature’s pattern reflects an ideal order-appeal because they fulfill our yen for order while expressing deeply or widely held beliefs of their eras. We believe the theory because the theory expresses our beliefs. But these idealist theories pose a grave threat to the empiricism that forms the heart of Western science, for they make reality a concept rather than some thing that can be reliably observed, measured, and known. Rare is the scientist who will confess to idealist thinking. As there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no idealists (at least, no admitted idealists) in science labs. Louis Agassiz, for instance, would hardly have admitted to being one. He would have argued (and did) that he was an empiricist, insisting he held observation above all. He was deluded, of course. His plan of creation, though supported by his observations, did not really rise from them. Rather, it reflected his notion that the world was created by God and that species were physical expressions of the “thoughts of God.” He fit his observations to his vision. He was an idealist masquerading as an empiricist.

After Darwin’s book came out in late 1859, Louis mounted an all-or-nothing attack on it. He waged his war on two fronts: one among peers, another in the popular press and lecture circuit. On the popular front Louis actually won a draw, at least in the United States, for most Americans chose the straddle mentioned earlier. Even 150 years later, over half of Americans continued to believe that God either created most species as is or somehow directs evolution.

This happy compromise ignores, of course, the philosophical implications that haunted Darwin and overlooks the underlying disagreement about how one should seek answers. Louis’s idealist logic and Darwin’s empirical method clashed as violently as did their creationist and mechanistic conclusions. For scientists of the era, this argument about method mattered as much as whether we arose from God or monkey. And it was this methodological debate that Louis so decisively lost.

A debate, of course, requires an opponent, and even Darwin couldn’t argue effectively from across the Atlantic. He didn’t much like arguing anyway, preferring to sway through his writing while friends did the knife work. In England, Thomas Huxley, self-anointed as “Darwin’s bulldog,” did the bloodiest of it. Huxley won an early and instantly famous debate over Darwinism even though his opponent, the former Oxford debater Archbishop Wilberforce, fired the most memorable salvo of the entire long war: In June 1860, before an excited crowd at Oxford, Wilberforce wrapped up his creationist attack on Origin by asking Huxley whether it was through his grand-father or grandmother that he descended from a monkey. The agnostic Huxley, murmuring to a friend, “The Lord hath delivered him unto my hands,” rose, rubbing those hands together, and dismantled the archbishop’s argument. He finished by declaring that if given the choice between kinship to a smelly ape or to a man willing to use his intelligence and privilege to twist the truth, he would choose the ape. The packed hall erupted in shouting; one woman reportedly fainted.

Darwin’s American advocate was hardly so flashy. The Harvard botanist Asa Gray, it will be recalled, was among those who warmly welcomed Louis Agassiz to America. Far less outgoing than Louis (he preferred doing taxonomy to lecturing about it), Gray, at Harvard since 1842, had won eminence through solid work, lucid writing, and judicious promotion of rigorous science. As charmed as most by Louis’s high spirits and dazzling talk, he had accompanied him on his first trip to Philadelphia and Washington in 1846 to introduce him to the country’s scientific establishment. He was thrilled when Agassiz joined the Harvard faculty, inviting him to dinner several times to meet new colleagues. Louis would often stay late at these dinners as he and Gray talked deep into the night. Their rapport seemed to promise long allegiance.

The Harvard botanist Asa Gray, among the first to reconcile a devout Christianity with a belief in Darwinian evolution. is conversion turned him from a fiend of Louis’s to one of his worst enemies.

But the two differed often over the next fifteen years. In the mid-1850s, at a time when the issues of race and slavery repeatedly took the United States to the brink of civil war, Gray was disgusted to see Louis offer scientific views supporting racist arguments. Louis held that different human races, like similar but different animal species, had been created separately-and none too equally. This theory conflicted with both Gray’s growing scientific belief in species descent and his Christian belief in humankind’s common origin.

Gray also favored a more egalitarian, less authoritarian educational model than Agassiz did, and the two clashed repeatedly over how to shape the growing university. Similarly, Louis favored an elitist, invitation-only structure in scientific organizations, whereas Gray, his geologist friend James Dwight Dana of Yale, and many others preferred a more open, democratic structure based on interest and commitment. And Gray, despite himself, resented that Louis garnered unprecedented attention and funding while he struggled to raise enough money to replace pickets in the botanical garden’s fence. Gray, Dana, and others also felt that Louis’s pursuit of fame, funding, and lecture opportunities was leading him to practice sloppy science and oversimplify its results. His love of popular lecturing “has greatly injured him,” Gray complained at one point, leading him to “tamper with strict veracity for the sake of popular effect.” These resentments sharpened in 1858 when Louis sent an article to the American Journal of Science expressing support for a book by one of his protégés, Jules Marco, that harshly attacked the work of Gray’s friend Dana (who happened to edit the Journal) and other American geologists-and insisted that his letter be printed even though he had not read the book it praised. After consulting Gray, Dana printed Louis’s letter along with a rejoinder and a note explaining the whole affair.

All this accrued to quite a pile of bother. But what irked Gray most-more every year-was that the view of species Louis sold so effectively was idealist rather than empirical.

Gray had once held rather idealist views himself, even while professing empiricism. This was a common stance among scientists in the mid-nineteenth century, as a growing commitment to empiricism eroded various idealist assumptions and approaches. The year Agassiz arrived in America, for instance (1846), Gray reviewed a con- troversial work called Explanations: A Sequel to “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” that espoused a roughly Lamarckian theory of evolution. (Louis’s Lowell Lectures the following winter were partly a response to the same book.) Gray panned Vestiges, attacking its shoddy science and concluding that its unproven Lamarckian evolutionary scheme must be rejected because the “unity we perceive in nature” is one to which “sound science has ever delighted to point, as the proof that all is the direct handiwork of a single omniscient Creator.” As yet, Gray wrote, those arguing that species arise any other way “are bound to show that natural agencies are competent to pro duce such results… The burden of proof rests upon them.” This could easily have been Louis talking.

For Gray, however, the burden of proof would soon shift-or, more to the point, it would apply as much to speculative religious explanations as to speculative evolutionary theories. During the 1850s Gray grew ever more self-consciously empiricist. He would come to insist that theories correspond first and foremost with observable evidence. Though he was more conscientious about this than most, he was hardly alone. But Gray would only take this push for a more rigorous empiricism so far. If he was among the few to immediately accept the theory of natural selection, he would not admit its ruthlessly mechanistic implications (or those of the larger evolutionary theory). Instead he chose to believe, as would so many after him, not only that God had created life in some manner “lost in the mists of time” but that in some similarly unknowable manner he now directed the selective process. Thus Gray conceded to his devout Christianity, yielding, as he saw it, in an arena beyond the knowable.

Otherwise, however, Gray viewed religious or abstract explanations warily. He trusted instead the literal and demonstrable. In the 1850s, as Agassiz’s idealist preachings began to grate, Gray found sup port for his empiricism in his friendship with several English naturalists, most notably Joseph Hooker, the eminent and well-traveled botanist who would later direct the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew Gray had met Hooker while visiting England in the late 1830s, and since then the two had pioneered the subdiscipline of plant geography. Like Darwin’s and others’ close attention to the distribution of animal species, their study of the geographical distribution of plants would reveal much about evolution’s dynamics. For now, pre-Origin, their efforts were notable for their empirical tenor: a broadening enquiry, ever tied to direct evidence, into why plant species were distributed as they were.

Hooker and the other British scientists Gray corresponded with, all friends of Darwin’s, tried to practice the no-nonsense empiricism first articulated by their countryman John Locke a century before and elaborated in the early to mid-i8oos by the British philosopher-scientists William Wheel and John Stuart Mill. Gray, besieged by Louis’s idealist spinnings as well as by the transcendentalism then being spangled about by Emerson, Thoreau, and their followers, was glad to find such literal-mindedness in scientists so respected and prominent.* By the late 1850s he was ready to let empiricism override not only speculative evolutionary schema such as that of Vestiges but creationist elaborations such as Louis’s. After all, both made the same sort of unfounded conceptual jump-exciting but ultimately unsupportable-that left one standing on air. As he put it to Hooker in 1858, “[I] sympathize more with & estimate higher the slow induction that leads step by step to sound conclusions so far as they go, than the bolder flights of the genius which so often leads the possessor to mount three pairs of steps only to jump out of the garret window.”

The idea that species were God’s “direct handiwork”-a conviction Gray had once shared with Louis-was starting to feel like a jump out the window.

What brought Gray to ground was a botanical conundrum. As early as the 1840s, he had noted that eastern North America and eastern Asia, especially Japan, had in common many plants found nowhere else-identical or closely similar species growing a world apart. Forty plant genera grew only in these two areas. He noted this oddity in print on several occasions but lacked time to examine it closely.

In 1855, however, a new pen pal revived his interest in the puzzle. Charles Darwin, drawing on their mutual friendship with Joseph Hooker (and having admired a letter that Gray sent to Hooker regarding plant geography), wrote Gray asking for help in solving some plant-species distribution problems he was struggling with. As always, Darwin was humble, solicitous, and subversively Socratic, even while fishing for information he genuinely needed: “As I am no Botanist, it will seem so absurd to you my asking botanical questions, that I may premise that I have for several years been collecting facts on ‘variation,’ and when I find that any general remark seems to hold amongst animals, I try to test it in Plants.” Though in this particular letter Darwin asked about differences among North American alpine plants, his confession to testing ideas on “variation” against Gray’s plant data sums up the course of their ensuing correspondence. Their exchanges would greatly strengthen Darwin’s theories even as he sold them to Gray.

It wasn’t by accident. At the time Hooker reintroduced Darwin and Gray (who had met briefly when Gray toured England in 1838), Hooker was one of just two people to whom Darwin had confessed his theory of evolution. (Charles Lyell was the other.) Hooker and Darwin had corresponded extensively about how anomalies of plant distribution seemed to support Darwin’s ideas about species change. Like Darwin’s Galápagos finches, plant species on nearby islands often took closely similar forms that suggested descent from common ancestors. Hooker had seen this in the plants Darwin brought back from the Galápagos, and he had noted many similarities in plant communities in the European Alps and the Arctic, as if those two flora had once shared a single habitat and then been separated. Hooker recognized that Gray’s North America-Asia conundrum offered a similar puzzle-and that if Darwin’s theory helped Gray solve it, it would strengthen the theory and win Darwin an important ally. He set the two men up knowing damn well what he was doing.

For two years, then, Darwin-unassuming, politic, and also knowing damn well-plied Gray with questions about plant-distribution problems in North America and particularly about the America-Asia puzzle, leading Gray to consider more deeply the possible links between species distribution and “variation,” or species change. Darwin’s intriguing questions, modest suggestions, and requests for clarification helped Gray see much about plant geography that, short of an Agassizian leap of faith in divine creation, seemed explainable only by some mechanism of transmutation.

It was a brilliant strategy, convincing Gray not by rhetoric but by enticing him to reconsider the evidence on his own lab tables. Gray saw that he was being led, and he gathered from Hooker that Darwin was nursing some new evolutionary theory. He recognized that one of his most important tenets, “Like breeds like,” was being challenged. Yet he allowed it. For Gray’s belief in species fixity stemmed less from religious or essentialist principles than from empirical observation. His thousands of hours classifying plant specimens had convinced him that if species were not fixed, if species boundaries could be easily and often crossed, then the order he perceived in his many specimens would have broken down long ago, and he would not find the fairly clear distinctions he saw daily. He believed in species fixity, in short, because it seemed to confirm what he saw. But as a belief based on observation, he held it open to revision. By the late 1850s he had already softened this belief, for he knew Hooker and others were questioning it, and he himself saw growing evidence that species varied so much as to stretch their own boundaries. Many specimens seemed to lie right on species boundaries. The question was what “natural agency,” to use the terms with which he’d skewered Vestiges, might “be competent to produce such results.” Hooker’s hints that Darwin was pondering such an agency did not surprise him.

Finally, in July 1857, Darwin fessed up. With a short letter followed by an abstract, he made Gray the third confidant to know of his theory of evolution, including his ideas on natural selection. His letter was typically self-effacing and disarming. He offered his ideas as admittedly blasphemous and doubtless flawed while making clear the key mechanism-the selection and amplification of advantage- genus traits through greater survival and reproductive rates of the individuals who happened to inherit them-that elevated his above previous transmutation theories. The following summer, Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace (who had finally scared the cautious Dar win into publishing by writing him of his own, similar theory) published their short papers in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, providing a slightly fuller explanation and making his theory a matter of record.

Gray was at first warily receptive to Darwin’s theory, then increasingly convinced. The logic seemed sound. Even if Darwin himself worried aloud to Gray (somewhat in the manner of one looking to have an insecurity contradicted) that this theory was “grievously hypothetical,” it nevertheless made an argument based on a natural process rather than a supernatural one. But what truly sold Gray, in those months between Darwin’s private confession of the theory and his publication of a more fully developed version in the Linnean Society papers and then Origin, was the light the theory shed on the botanical puzzle he himself had long been pondering.

How did such a large group of identical or nearly identical species come to exist only in two areas far apart, Japan and North America? Nearby islands, of course, often shared closely similar plant communities, but that was easily explained by assuming that the islands had once been high points on a single landmass that sank. That didn’t seem to apply to Asia and North America.

Yet Gray applied something very close to that explanation, solving the puzzle by essentially treating the two great continents as islands formerly joined. Though this seems routine in our post-plate-tectonics era, it was a big leap at the time. In one of the boomerang like ironies that careened through the contradiction-filled air around Louis Agassiz, Gray connected and disconnected the two continents via Louis’s ice age theory. Using a hypothesis Hooker had applied with good results to European alpine flora, Gray proposed that in the warm part of the Tertiary period, a single temperate flora had spread unbroken across the northern reaches of Asia and North America- unbroken, he asserted, because the two continents had then shared a land bridge across the Bering Strait. This band of flora lay well north of what later became Japan and eastern North America. When the next ice age came, however, the cooling climate pushed these plant communities southward, splitting them, as they moved down either side of the Pacific, into separate communities in North America and eastern Asia. Subsequent climate changes, such as the increasing dry-ness of the American West, then drove the two communities into the more limited areas found by Gray’s time.

This explanation was hardly free of speculation. But it was far more empirical than the notion that God arbitrarily placed identical species in two places a world apart. Yet a mystery remained. If these two communities were remnants of a former single community, why were some of the species closely similar but not identical?

Enter Darwin’s new theory. In Gray’s paper, drafted and refined over late 1858 and early 1859, he accepted and employed, gingerly but quite clearly, Darwin’s notion (as Darwin put it in his original letter of confession to Gray) that species “are only strongly defined varieties” that rose from a common ancestor. In the millennia since the two plant populations separated, Gray explained, some of the species had diverged enough to become taxonomically distinct from their cousins across the Pacific.

Gray’s Japan paper still stands as a thoughtful, creative, and bold piece of work and a pioneering accomplishment of biogeography Along with Hooker’s papers, it was one of the first to use Darwin’s theory in the way it would so often be used later: to explain the anomalies of species distribution. For Gray, the paper confirmed not only the strength of Darwin’s theory but the obsolescence of Agas-siz’s. He realized the Japan paper armed him well to challenge Agas-siz, for it contradicted virtually every aspect of Louis’s view of species creation and order. It even used Agassiz’s own ice age theory (his most solid piece of work, as Gray saw it) against him in a way sure to heighten the contrast between Louis’s idealism and Gray’s empiricism. For Gray described the ice age not as a sudden holocaust erasing all life so God could start over, but in a more restrained sense, as a gradual natural event that pushed species around rather than wiping them out wholesale.

With Origin soon to be published, Gray sensed the time was ripe to dethrone Agassiz and relieve American science of his speculative, idealist vision. Gray had no idea that the Darwinian theory he incorporated into his Japan theory would turn the world upside down. But he saw full well that it might upend Louis.

Gray chose a friendly forum in which to first air his ideas, reading an early version of the paper at a meeting of the Cambridge Scientific Society, a small club of which both he and Agassiz were members, on December 10, 1858. This was a full year before Origin appeared, though several months after the Darwin and Wallace papers were read at the Linnean Society in London. Though no transcript of the talk survives, notes from attendees suggest that Gray (like Darwin, a rather cautious revolutionary) presented his ideas on species drift with a delicacy of language similar to that which he used a few months later in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a footnote within that published version of his talk, Gray asserted that Darwin’s theory would resolve the “fundamental and most difficult question remaining in natural history” and predicted it would hold “a prominent part in all future investigations into the distribution and probable origin of species.” But he described the actual theory of variation and new-species creation in fairly tentative language, writing that “the limits of occasional variation in species … are wider than is generally supposed, and … derivative forms when segregated may be as constantly reproduced as their originals”-in other words, variations might become new species. Whether the listener would infer those other words (or even read the footnote) was left to chance. As for the Cambridge Society meeting, Gray appears to have drawn on Darwin’s speciation theory only enough to help explain his solution to the Japan-North America plant-distribution puzzle.

Gray wrote a friend afterward that Louis took the presentation “very well indeed.” In fact, Louis, distracted by museum matters at the time, seemed to miss how large an issue Gray was raising. Gray, however, felt emboldened. He immediately arranged to read the paper before a fuller, more important audience at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences meeting the following month. There, he wrote his friend John Torrey in New York, he would “knock out the underpinning of Agassiz’s theories about species and their origin [by] turning Agassiz’s own guns [i.e., his ice age theory as well as much of his data on species distribution] against him.”

When the meeting came, Gray was indeed bolder. He spoke for more than an hour, laying out his argument and stating explicitly that this view of species distribution, creation, and variability directly contradicted the theory of species distribution and fixity offered by Agassiz-which theory, as Gray put it, “offers no scientific explanation of the present distribution of species over the globe; but simply supersedes explanation, by affirming, that as things now are, so they were at the beginning; whereas the facts of the case … appear to demand from science something more than a direct reference of the phenomena as they are to the Divine will.”

If Louis had missed the directness of Gray’s challenge before, he certainly saw it now. Gray stood before a room of peers accusing him of pseudoscience. But Louis was uncharacteristically measured in response. In a half-hour deflection maneuver, he declined to rebut Gray’s botanical argument by pleading knowledge mainly of zoology which knowledge he then drew on to reaffirm his position and deny without rebutting the evidence just presented, that climate affected species distribution.

Perhaps recognizing that he had not quite risen to the occasion, Louis proposed at the next Academy of Arts and Sciences meeting, two weeks later, that this subject of species origin be pursued in a series of “discussions.” His old friend Ben Peirce, possibly hoping to rally the sort of crowd before which Louis usually prevailed, moved that the meetings be open to the general public. (Peirce’s and Agas-siz’s feelings on exclusivity softened when convenient.) The group agreed. Over the months ahead, in a series of three debates, Gray and Agassiz fired the first shots in what would become a loud and long war.

It is one of history’s minor oddities that no one saw it that way at the time. The resistance to Darwin’s idea was that complete. Every one saw that Agassiz was being challenged, but they missed that a common, fundamental view of the world was also under fire. The two men debated at academy meetings that February, March, and April. A couple times the debate started from the Japan paper, and once it started from Louis’s presentation, yet again, of his “Plan of Creation” lecture. Gray was more explicit and pejorative every time about the difference in views and methods being presented, repeatedly contrasting his view of species distribution and creation to Agas-siz’s, which he said was so speculative and idealist that it “remove[s] the whole question out of the field of inductive science.” Finally, in May, in the cozier forum of a Cambridge Scientific Club meeting held in his own garden house, Gray let the big cat out of the bag. “To see how it would strike a dozen people of varied minds and habits of thought, and partly, I confess, maliciously to vex the soul of Agassiz with views so diametrically opposed to all his pet notions,” he explicated Darwin’s theory directly, summarizing and reading parts from Darwin’s Linnean Society paper and the abstract Darwin had sent him, presenting plainly Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection and noting once again that this view of species creation directly contradicted Louis’s idealist vision.

Well there, Gray must have thought; that should do it. Yet even now no one seemed to see how huge a door was swinging on the small hinge of these debates. No one seemed to note, for example, the distinction that Darwin’s insight about natural selection gave his theory; they instead likened it to Lamarck’s. Everyone seemed to regard the debate as a lively but essentially routine academic spat.

The apparent thickheadedness of Gray’s Cambridge audiences was almost surely due to the deeply subversive nature of Darwin’s thinking. It would take the six hundred pages of Origin, with its agile argument wielding a huge weight of evidence, to convince them of evolution and common descent, and decades more before the fright-eningly mechanistic natural-selection theory took hold. It would take the inflamed, post publication shouting of religious rebutters and self-styled Darwinian agnostics to highlight the philosophical and religious differences between the two views. Gray wasn’t about to get such work done in a few evenings’ repartee with Louis.

Doubtless the attendees were also partly fooled by the debaters’ collegiality A friendly decorum prevailed at these meetings; the two were, after all, neighbors. Gray, despite his directness and his deep, long resentments, was his usual polite self, and Louis, a bit uncertain on this new ground and perhaps not wanting to start a shooting war, remained gracious in response. The gladiatorial atmosphere of the Huxley-Wilberforce face-off never took hold. On the contrary, these meetings in the spring of 1859-before the publication of Origin, before the infamous Huxley rejoinder, before America’s religionists started feuding with America’s scientific rebels and agnostics, before, in short, Darwin’s book ignited a popular controversy-witnessed what may have been the last sustained congeniality between two col leagues who had once approached close friendship and now faced each other across an opening abyss. Both still behaved as if their collegiality could span the rift, as if their differences could be raised, explored, summarized, and then set aside like most scientific and philosophical discussions, and that life and work (as Gray probably feared and Agassiz surely hoped) would continue as before.

But if the audience seemed to miss the depth of the chasm dividing the two professors, Gray and Agassiz did not. After the last of the debates, the one held at the garden house where they had once shared long dinners, Agassiz told his colleague, “Gray, we must stop this.” Gray would remember the words even twenty years later.

A few weeks after that last May meeting, Louis sailed to Europe for a long-planned and much-needed vacation, creating a ceasefire in the debate with Gray. When he returned in late September, things stayed quiet, as he resumed teaching and organizing the new museum.

Almost as soon as the first copies of Origin arrived on American shores around Christmas, however, Agassiz could see that this debate would not stop. Darwin’s book-engaging and accessible but sup ported by broad knowledge and compelling detail-was the buzz not only of the scientific world but of wider literary and academic circles, exciting discussion within the same milieu Louis had once effortlessly dominated. It immediately sold well, with a full print run of 1,750 copies selling out in the United States by May 1, a stunning distribution then for a book of science. Several of Agassiz’s students read the book in the weeks after its publication, as did others in the close Harvard community. Harvard aesthetics professor Charles Eliot Norton, for instance, wrote a friend that he, the eminent Harvard zoologist Jeffries Wyman, the poet James Lowell (an Agassiz friend), and the historian Henry Torrey met excitedly the day after Christmas and “grew warm” discussing the book, recognizing immediately that “if Darwin is right, Agassiz is wrong.”

Louis recognized this too. And now, rested from his trip, invigo- rated by the enthusiasm of his new students and the possibilities his new museum offered to buttress his case, he took up anew the job of refuting Darwin’s folly.

Doing so proved maddeningly difficult. At the January 1860 meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Louis reasserted the fixity of species by trying to refute any relationship between Tertiary period seashell fossils and present forms. He was soundly contradicted by William Barton Rogers, a prominent geologist who was then starting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ben Peirce called for another series of discussions, but his friend fared even worse this time around. In early March Louis tried to move the fight from Gray’s turf to his own by claiming that “varieties, properly so called, have no existence, at least in the animal kingdom,” and at a meeting two weeks later, in a sort of surprise managerial move, he sent a couple of stand-ins-a Harvard philosophy professor defending tenets of essentialism and Louis’s old bene factor John Amory Lowell, the textile magnate-to attack Darwin on philosophical and religious grounds. Louis’s use of a businessman to forward a scientific debate suggests his growing desperation. (Dar win, on reading a review of Origin that Lowell subsequently published, noted, “It is clear [Lowell] is not [a] naturalist.”) Yet Louis had method in this madness, for Lowell was a dominant member of the Harvard Corporation, and his active opposition to Darwin carried an implicit warning to Gray about job security. But Gray, ignoring both the zoological bait and the veiled threat, countered the next month by using a wealth of botanical data to show not only that variations existed in nature but that natural selection retained and amplified them.

Meanwhile another debate series had sprung up at the Boston Society of Natural History. Here Louis, rushing from one front to another, found himself again outflanked by the geologist William Rogers. A charismatic lecturer himself, Rogers had transmuted into a sort of American Huxley, repeatedly turning Louis’s paleontological and ice age research (as well as his own vast geological and paleontological knowledge) against him. These meetings provided an extra dimension of aggravation and humiliation (not to mention a disturbing sign of things to come) when some of Louis’s own students asked provocative questions that fanned the debate.

None of these contretemps were true scientific debates. They were rhetorical battles in which a new argument confronted a wall of stubbornly repeated assertions. Gray pointed this out in a long, lucid, and measured review of Origin of Species in the March issue of the American Journal of Science. Playing the dispassionate arbiter, he contrasted Darwin’s view of species with Agassiz’s. Charles Darwin saw facts of nature as “complex facts, to be analyzed and interpreted scientifically” and “view[ed] them in their relations to one another, and endeavour[ed] to explain them … through natural causes.” Louis Agassiz, on the contrary, treated the facts of nature as “ultimate facts [to be] interpreted theologically” and viewed them “only in their supposed relation to the Divine mind.” Darwin’s theory of species, despite some flaws Gray perceived, was “a legitimate attempt to extend the domain of natural or physical science.” Louis’s theory was “theistic to excess.” Though the tone was more tactful, the message was as a year before: What Louis Agassiz did could not be called science. Gray would send the same message to an even wider audience in a three-part article on Origin in the July, August, and September issues of the Atlantic Monthly. This Atlantic series extended the debate into the popular realm and, given that the magazine was owned and edited by good friends of Louis, spoke volumes about how far the center of debate had moved in just six months.

Louis, meanwhile, dragged his feet in providing a written critique of Origin. He promised to send one to the American Journal of Science by early February but did not deliver. This prompted Gray to write Hooker that “Agassiz has again failed to provide his promised criticism on Darwin for [the] Jour[nal] after promising it over and over… [He has] failed because [of] the poor stuff-as everybody calls it-he has been pouring out at the Academy. I do not wonder that he hesitates to commit himself to print. I really think his mind has deteriorated within a few years.”

When Louis’s first printed rebuttal of Darwin finally appeared in the July 1860 American Journal of Science, it seemed to confirm that he would rather stubbornly defend an idealist vision than undertake the critical thinking of science. Ostensibly a review of Origin, the piece was really an expanded version of a chapter from his own Contributions to the Natural History of the United States in which he re-rehashed his plan-of-creation scheme. Here he stated-proudly, as if this proved Darwinism’s falsity-that “the arguments presented by Darwin … have not made the slightest impression on my mind.” Darwin’s evolutionary theory was a “scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency.”

Yet Louis could not so convince his colleagues. They had read Darwin’s book, talked about it extensively, and saw it was no Vestiges. While many scientists first received Darwin’s theory guardedly few rejected it outright. They recognized Darwin’s empirical basis, respected the voluminous evidence he marshaled, and admired the lucid power of his argument. By trying to dispose wholesale of this engaging new theory, Louis exposed his close-mindedness and a hostility to his discipline’s inquisitive, empirical basis. Should someone who so arrogantly closed his mind to a productive idea stand as an icon of American science? More and more colleagues thought not.

Louis, apparently sensing that he was losing the scientific debate, took the fight to other fronts, writing for popular magazines, lecturing, and building the museum, whose collections, he felt sure, would yet prove Darwin wrong. He wrote his own piece for the Atlantic Monthly, rebutting Gray and Darwin; gave yet another series of Low ell Lectures on his plan of creation, which he soon published as a book (Methods of Natural Study) that went through several printings; gave a variation on that lecture series in New York, which he also quickly published in book form; and then composed a series of a dozen articles for the Atlantic Monthly that were also turned into a book. Between 1861 and 1866 he gave scores of lectures and published four books and twenty-one articles, almost all in the popular press, asserting his brand of special creationism. Yet even as he fought, he fell. He retained virtually no scientific allies. Most of his Harvard colleagues (as well as the Massachusetts legislature) continued to support the museum, and the scientific community continued to recognize the great value of his taxonomic and curatorial work. But as a theoretician, Louis walked alone. Even he, in writing only for the popular press, recognized that the scientific debate had moved on. His own students were questioning and deserting him. Col leagues grew less deferential. He began suffering political reversals. Members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, a group that Louis had long dominated, began siding with Gray on political matters, and in 1863 they elected Gray president and William Rogers secretary.

Louis’s most searing political defeat came at the 1864 meeting of a new scientific group he had helped found only the year before, the National Academy of Sciences (or NAS-unrelated to the Boston-based Academy of Arts and Sciences). The 1864 NAS meeting took place in New Haven, a location that should have warned Louis of trouble, for New Haven was home to Yale geologist James Dwight Dana, the Gray ally and American Journal of Science editor who had been attacked by Jules Marcou with Louis’s support. But Louis felt confident, for it was only the year before that he, Peirce, and their closest scientific allies, having had their elitist agenda rebuffed at the Academy of Arts and Sciences, had founded the National Academy of Sciences specifically to emulate the elite, election-only French academies Louis admired. The new academy’s elitist function seemed confirmed by its designation as the federal government’s official scientific advisor. Membership was limited to fifty and internally elected; since Louis, Peirce, and their allies had handpicked most of the original forty-nine, they figured to control subsequent entries, including the addition of the fiftieth member, which was part of the business for the 1864 meeting.

But the meeting (only the organization’s second) brought a stunning reversal. Gray, Dana, and a few allies, using a slippery, last-minute switch of career geologist Dana to the organization’s zoology section so he could cast a deciding nominating vote within that section, managed to give the fiftieth spot to Smithsonian Institution director Spencer Baird, a man whom Louis hated because he lent Louis specimens only reluctantly and, worse, had once hired a defecting Agassiz assistant. Louis was livid. Gray had outmaneu-vered, outvoted, and embarrassed him in the elitist political structure that he himself had founded. The incident starkly lit his fall from power. On the train back to Boston, he confronted Gray, calling him “no gentleman” and apparently other words less printable, insulting Gray so deeply that the two would not speak again for several years. Back in Cambridge Agassiz complained widely, and rumor spread that he had challenged Gray to a duel (swords, presumably). Had he received such a challenge, Gray, even were he not pacific to begin with, would surely have declined. He had already won.

From this nadir Louis never rose. Fame showed its rough side now, as the scientific world and most of Louis’s social circle heard of his humiliating losses to Gray. With Louis’s diminished political clout made clear by his failed power plays at both the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the NAS, colleagues and students began to speak openly of his scientific obsolescence. His stock fell particularly low among younger scientists and intellectuals. As his own students deserted him, so the younger intelligentsia in Cambridge and else where, thrilling to the intellectual vitality they found in the discussion of Darwin, began to see in Louis-only five years earlier the prince of American science-an archaic reactionary.

By the fall of 1864, Louis, worn down psychically and physically decided to take a long vacation the following year in Brazil, where he could visit his old friends the Amazonian fishes. About the time he decided on the trip, John Lowell invited him once again to lecture at the Lowell Institute. At the lectures that winter, Louis, making one last attempt to plough Darwin under before he himself went south, expanded his glacial theory to the Amazon, where he said the zoological and geological record-oh, if only anyone had resources to explore it!-would surely show that even there all life had been wiped out by the last ice age and replaced with new species whole sale, by divine plan rather than evolution.

Nathaniel Thayer, one of Boston’s richest men, a longtime supporter of Louis, and an audience member that night, accepted Agas-siz’s thinly veiled solicitation and offered to fund such a trip. And so in April 1865, as America’s Civil War came to a close, Louis sailed off to collect evidence that once and for all would prove Darwin wrong. It was a bizarre trip. Along with three paid scientists, Liz Cary his old artist Jacques Burkhardt, and for part of the trip a bishop, Louis took along several untrained assistants, including the young William James, who had taken a couple of classes with Agassiz and thought him both fascinating and revolting. Louis had grand plans for this crew. As James noted in a letter home early in the trip, “The Professor has just been expatiating over the map of South America and making projects as if he had Sherman’s army at his disposal instead of the 10 novices he really has.” James observed that Louis was typically grandiose in other ways as well. When a fellow passenger, a Mr. Billings, offered to lend Agassiz some books, Agassiz asked, “‘May I enter your state room and take them when I shall want them, Sir?’

Billings, extending his arm, said genially: ‘Sir, all that I have is yours!’ To which, Agassiz, far from being overcome, replied shaking a monitory finger at the foolishly generous wight: ‘Look out, Sirr, dat I take not your skin!’ That expresses very well the man.”

Louis and Liz were gone for sixteen months, scattering Thayer’s money far and wide. Louis hoped to collect enough species to reveal a pattern that natural selection could not explain and to find geological proof of a cataclysmic ice age. He collected plenty: eighty thou sand specimens, so many fish, crustaceans, and mollusks that it took Alex and the museum’s minions over a decade to classify them. There were fifty barrels of crayfish alone.

But neither all the fish nor the sparse evidence of glaciation that Louis found proved him out. The geology in the popular account that Liz and Louis wrote (made a best-seller by Agassiz fans and arm chair travelers) made scientists shake their heads in wonder. His findings did nothing to refute Darwinism. Yet to the astonishment of many, he professed to believe otherwise. When he returned in August 1866, he immediately began lecturing on the trip’s discoveries, incorporating his hurried, rather desperate analysis of Brazilian zoology and geology into his old plan-of-creation spiel. He concluded his talk, titled “Traces of Glaciers Under the Tropics,” with the words, “And so that is the end of Darwin.”

Twenty years earlier, Louis had wowed everyone-young, old, idealists, empiricists-with an earlier version of this lecture. Much had changed. The impression he now made was captured most bitingly that summer night in 1866 by one of his Cambridge audience, a former student named Chauncey Wright, the brilliant but troubled “philosopher of Cambridge,” a friend of William James and a con temporary of Alex’s. Wright had once taken a class with Louis, and in 1860, when Origin came out, he had been teaching at the Agassiz Girls’ School. At that time, having previously taken Louis’s professed empiricism to heart, he was so appalled by Louis’s reactionary, idealist response to Origin that he quit the school faculty. Agassiz’s plan-of-creation theory, he had written a friend then, “covers ignorance with a word pretending knowledge and feigning reverence.” Now, in the Brazil talk, Wright confronted something worse than ignorance; he saw a calcification of both mind and ego. As he wrote Charles Eliot Norton, “Agassiz repeated … what he has said at every scientific meeting at which I have heard him speak, and he said it with as much animation as if the world were not weary of it. It is a chronic case of public speaking,-a brilliant idea which occurred to him once upon a time, and has been a standing marvel of inspiration ever since.”

Alex, of course, was watching.

*Like most naturalists, he was catholic in his interests; his first published paper was on the flight mechanisms of butterflies.

*Gray found many of the transcendentalists’ speculations and poetic expansions unfounded or flatly ridiculous, while they found him a drudge. However, as A. Hunter Dupree notes in his excellent Asa Gray, Thoreau, at least, sometimes managed to find in Gray a launch-pad for flights of fancy:

When Thoreau was struck by a passage in Gray, he read into it a symbolism which changed the matter-of-fact scientific prose beyond recognition. He pondered a statement by Gray that roots “not only spring from the root-end of the primary stem in germination, but also from any subsequent part of the stem under favorable circumstances, that is to say, in darkness and moisture, as when covered by the soil or resting on its surface.” It is certain that Gray meant here exactly what he said, but for Thoreau those words meant that “the most clear and ethereal ideas (Antaeus like) readily ally themselves to the earth, to the primal womb of things.”

A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 222; quoting from The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, eds. B. Torrey and F. H. Alen (Boston, 1949), xi, 208.