In Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, Christoph  Irmscher offers a memorable biography of a forgotten figure. The Swiss-born Agassiz made a name for himself as a pioneering glaciologist. In 1840, he rocked the establishment with his publication of Etudes sur la Glaciers, asserting that all of Europe and Asia had once been covered by a vast sheet of ice. Agassiz maintained that prehistoric species such as the mammoths and mastodons buried beneath the glaciers had been divinely created to occupy their assigned ranges, and did not migrate or evolve into other forms over time. God’s flora and fauna were a static set.

In 1847, Agassiz emigrated to America, where he joined the Harvard faculty and thereafter founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Obsessed with building a collection of millions of natural history specimens, Agassiz morphed into a Barnum-esque impresario-curator, reducing his commitment as a serious working scientist. Nonetheless, with a sprawling network of amateur collectors all over the U.S. proudly shipping fishes, amphibians and reptiles from their necks of the woods to him in Cambridge, Agassiz cultivated a reputation as the patriarch of a new national family of science.

Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 was a frontal assault on Agassiz’s concept of the fixity of species, and over the ensuing decade Agassiz became Darwin’s last great American opponent. Despite a growing list of defectors from his proposition that animals and plants never evolve from their “prophetic types,” Agassiz was lionized by the likes of Henry Ward Beecher and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. On the day after his funeral in 1873, Agassiz was mourned on front pages across his adopted land and newspapers in Boston were printed with black borders. Upon his interment in Mount Auburn Cemetery, however, Agassiz receded with astonishing swiftness into a lost world of the past. 

Irmscher captures his subject’s rise and fall with insight and style, commencing with a chapter bearing the Updikean title, “Agassiz At Rest,” which describes Agassiz’s autopsy by a seven-member team of New England’s elite surgeons that concentrated  on his extraordinarily large and heavy brain. “More effectively than Agassiz would ever have envisioned, his postmortem validated what his life had stood for: the power and authority and the right of the people to share in its findings. … And so Agassiz lived on, after a fashion, as a specimen,” Irmscher writes. Unfortunately for the specimen’s once-supreme reputation, having a 99th percentile brain volume didn’t tip  in his favor on the scales of history, as he was proven grievously wrong on two transcendent questions of the era.

The first was evolution, as to which Agassiz never opened his big mind, even after an expedition to Brazil in 1865-66. Indeed, Agassiz violated his own admonition to his Amazonian expedition team: that they should not become “collectors rather than investigators.” To that, Irmscher wryly comments,“If only he had stuck to his own advice. … Increasingly, Agassiz in Brazil seemed less like God-turned-scientist and more like the general manager of a corporation … whose assistants would fan out over the vast Amazon basin … and report back to him with their profits.”

Agassiz returned from Manaos with thousands of odd specimens that he convinced himself were separate species divinely created for the places in which they were found, unrelated to creatures elsewhere. He identified invalid new species by the hundreds, misconceiving peculiar individuals within single, variable species. Thus, Agassiz became taxonomists’ first and foremost “splitter,” in order not to undercut his precept that the Creator’s exquisite design was frozen in the beginning.

Many scientists and philosophers were on the wrong side of evolution for religious reasons, so Agassiz was hardly alone in failing to acknowledge natural selection. The odd thing about Agassiz, though, is that he had already shown sufficient intellectual rigor to depart from Biblical literalism where the evidence justified it, as in the case of the upheaval involved in his Ice Age scholarship. What caused Agassiz’s heavyweight mind to seize up where it did, in such adamant resistance to Darwin’s ideas? Irmscher tellingly recounts the history of competition, jealousy and resentment between two men; perhaps those human foibles were at the center of Agassiz’s blind spot.

The second question on which Agassiz went pathologically awry was the matter of racial equality. Agassiz had once written that “Whereas the animals are distinct species in the different zoological provinces to which they appertain, man, despite the diversity of his races, constitutes one and the same species all over the globe.” But his first encounter with black servants in Philadelphia precipitated a revulsion so profound that Agassiz wrote to his mother: “The feeling they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type and the unique origin of our species. … God preserve us from such a contact!”

The virulence of Agassiz’s racism dominated  his 1850 essay, “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,”  embracing the doctrine of polygeny, in which “submissive, obsequious, imitative”  blacks are a wholly separate species, to be denied social equality and prohibited from  interbreeding. Agassiz ultimately argued that the differences between blacks and whites “are greater than those distinguishing species of animals one from the other.”

Irmscher offers two explanations for Agassiz’s invidious views. The first is that he felt it necessary to fend off “any notion that nature might have developed to where it is today … an assumption that would also require us to assume that there was — horrible thought! — no general plan in place at the beginning of the Creation.” The second is that Agassiz, the immigrant, sought to align himself with other racist whites in America. Neither explanation speaks very well of Agassiz, as an enlightened scientist or as an enlightened human being.

To his credit, Irmscher is unsparing in exposing Agassiz’s “distinctly undelightful” prejudices and manias. One comes away from this engaging book with a sense of deep perplexity that the man who did more than anyone else to burnish the prestige of American biology in the 19th century could have been such a bigoted lout. For those who have read Ann Patchett’s poignant new novel, Run, in which one of the heroes is an adopted Kenyan immigrant ichthyologist-savant now in charge of Agassiz’s millions of specimens in the basements of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, there is the satisfying feeling that Agassiz must be rolling over in his grave at Mount Auburn.

Donald A. Carr is an environmental lawyer, a birder, and the author of a forthcoming biography of Elliot Richardson. 

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