Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science

by Christoph Irmscher

“This book is not just about a man of science but also about a scientific culture in the making—warts and all.” —The New York Times Book ReviewCharismatic and controversial Swiss immigrant Louis Agassiz took America by storm in the early nineteenth century, becoming a defining force in American science. Yet today, many don’t know the complex story behind this revolutionary figure. At a young age, Agassiz—zoologist, glaciologist, and paleontologist—was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Boston, and he never left. An obsessive pioneer in field research, Agassiz enlisted the American public in a vast campaign to send him natural specimens, dead or alive, for his ingeniously conceived museum of comparative zoology. As an educator of enduring impact, he trained a generation of American scientists and science teachers, men and women alike—and entered into collaboration with his brilliant wife, Elizabeth, a science writer in her own right and first president of Radcliffe College. But there was a dark side to his reputation as well. Biographer Christoph Irmscher reveals unflinching evidence of Agassiz’s racist impulses and shows how avidly Americans at the time looked to men of science to mediate race policy. He also explores Agassiz’s stubborn resistance to evolution, his battles with a student—renowned naturalist Henry James Clark—and how he became a source of endless bemusement for Charles Darwin and esteemed botanist Asa Gray. “A wonderful . . . biography,” both inspiring and cautionary, it is for anyone interested in the history of American ideas ( The Christian Science Monitor ). “A model of what a talented and erudite literary scholar can do with a scientific subject.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

Genres: Science, Biography, History, Nonfiction, History Of Science, American History, Nature

496 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Christoph Irmscher is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and American Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of Longfellow Redux, The Poetics of Natural History, and Public Poet, Private Man.

Reviews

[Sara Van Dyck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Irmscher admits in the introduction that Agassiz is a difficult man to love. I have always seen him as at best misguided and self-promoting. But this biography shows a complex and accomplished man – if still not lovable. He tried to teach students “how to observe,” instead of relying on reading, and he himself wrote the most careful, detailed descriptions of his specimens, living or pickled. He founded the great Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. By putting Agassiz in the context of his times, Irmscher illustrates the history of science and how issues of race and society that we consider settled today were subjects of such debate. There is also a fascinating view of his second wife, Elizabeth, who used her travels with him to make a different kind of contribution, the reflective and personal nature essay. But, given his egregious errors, I do not see how he deserves the author’s epithet, “Creator of American Science.”

[W. Nikola-Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sure I read about Louis Agassiz in high school, probably required reading in biology class. But I never really had a sense of the full person. Christoph Irmscher gives us that picture. Agassiz is not a pleasant fellow always: a charmer, yes, but don't cross his path (and be careful of how much of your own research you share with him). An anti-Darwinian evolutionist to the end, Agassiz had his own views of things, which he cultivated in his own domain: Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. Following Agassiz through Irmscher's well written and researched book is eye opening, especially the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake, subordinates who didn't have a chance against the bombastic, self-promoting scientist. Although Irmscher subtitles his book, Creator of American Science, that's an arguable point. Next book on the docket: Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic, which explores Silliman's important role in bringing science curricula to American universities in the early 19th century, forty or fifty years before Agassiz.

[Lucas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have never predicted writing this sentence, but I felt the author was too much of a Darwinist for my tastes. English professors are the most strident defenders of Darwin in the academy, so when you commission an EngProf to write about this topic it will lack balance. If your sympathies for Darwinian thought overshadow your interest in its predecessors, by all means, read this book and sneer. If you are genuinely interested in Agassiz and his work, look elsewhere.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is taken from my review appearing in the March 14, 2013 issue of the Christian Science Monitor.

In the introduction to his wonderful new biography Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, Christoph Irmscher carefully lists some of the more “undelightful” aspects of the life and work of the eminent Swiss zoologist, glaciologist, and paleontologist: “his shabby treatment of his first wife, whom he left when he traveled to the new world; his relentless resistance to Darwinism; and perhaps most of all his reprehensible belief that America belonged to whites only.” And it doesn’t get much better from there.

Agassiz (born Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz), a world-renowned and celebrated Swiss-born scientist whose name, more than 100 years later, would grace street signs, schools, and even a mountain range inSwitzerland, recently had his reputation almost single-handedly felled by a Cambridge, Mass., eighth-grader. The student, who attended the Agassiz School there, discovered Agassiz’s abhorrent racial views in an edition of biologist Stephen A. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man." The horrified student, Irmscher writes, “suggested that the school change its name, which it did.”

Irmscher, a professor of English at Indiana University, asks some very difficult questions about Agassiz’s legacy at the onset of this biography. Despite the book’s rather generous subtitle, Irmscher ultimately cannot reconcile Agassiz’s numerous and significant scientific achievements with his abhorrent views on evolution and race.

For example, Agassiz was an early and vociferous proponent of such biological quackery as polygenism (the idea that races of humans stemmed from distinct and different ancestors and thus were of separate origin) as well as miscegenation, or racial admixture within a society. Agassiz could also be called a prototypical 19th-century “racial philosopher” because of his curious obsession with comparative brain size and cranial capacity, and their relationship to intelligence among races of humans.

Agassiz, always the charismatic showman, compounded the damage to his own reputation by regaling attendees at a Charleston, S.C., conference with his racial sophistry, which unfortunately encouraged and enabled much of America’s pro-slavery faction. His patrons included the notorious Alabama physician Josiah C. Nott, who, as the owner of nine slaves, sought out Agassiz’s counsel to validate his own theories about the subjugation of blacks through slavery. Nott infamously stated that those indentured achieved their greatest perfection, physical and moral (as well as longevity), in a state of slavery. Agassiz and other scientists who espoused polygenism also emboldened colonialists, who believed that the inherent superiority of the white race gave credence to Kipling’s “white man’s burden" – the obligation and duty of whites to rule over other, presumably inferior, races.

Agassiz’s youth in Switzerland had a powerful influence on his own attitudes toward his family, students, and colleagues. His autocratic father was a merchant with both a manipulative personality and a provincial worldview. He sought to control his son’s career path by repeatedly suggesting that studying to become a zoologist (with two doctoral degrees, no less) was a waste of time and money. Agassiz’s mother was also aggressive, perhaps even abusive. The pressure she exerted on Agassiz’s beautiful and artistically talented wife Cécilie (Silli) Braun to subject herself to her husband’s ambitions left Silli feeling helpless and abandoned.

Eventually – in an act Irmscher likens to that of a “modern woman” – Silli took their children and left Agassiz. In September, 1846, Agassiz, whose writings and traveling lectures on glaciers, Brazilian fishes, and other exotic and arcane topics had brought him worldwide acclaim, would leave Europefor good to accept a professorship at Harvard University. And Silli, who once illustrated her husband’s published works and shared his professional enthusiasms, would die in loneliness and despair two years later.

Agassiz’s second wife, Elizabeth Cabot Cary, fared considerably better. Born into “blue-blood” Boston in 1822, “Lizzie” Cary had a powerful intellect rivaling that of Agassiz. She employed her intelligence to her future husband’s advantage – as well as her own – by editing his books and other writings. But hidden underneath the scholarly veneer and the "strenuously rational language" of their correspondence, Elizabeth had a “true, lasting affection” for Agassiz. Following their marriage in 1850, she sought to realize her keen interest in education by starting a private school for young girls in the attic of their Quincy Street home. Twenty-two years after Agassiz’s death, she became the first president of Radcliffe College. In between, she accompanied Agassiz on his Charleston lectures and assisted him in gathering specimens on the Galapagos Islands. And in her attempt to solidify her late husband’s legacy, she also authored a comprehensive and well-regarded biography of Agassiz.

Alexander von Humboldt, the pre-eminent zoologist during Agassiz’s youth, also had a profoundly important influence on Agassiz’s career. Mentor, patron, and cheerleader to Agassiz, von Humboldt had royal patrons, which gave him wealth and added to his prestige. He would write fawning letters to Agassiz, and his “scion” would respond with equally fawning, almost obsequious, replies. But if anyone could conjure insecurities in Agassiz, it was von Humboldt, whom Irmscher likens to Agassiz’s “surrogate father” – the one who really saw Agassiz’s scholarly potential and unselfishly nurtured and financed it.
Agassiz’s anxiety about von Humboldt’s towering legacy was never more in evidence than when Agassiz was asked to prepare a series of lectures at Harvard on the occasion of what would have been von Humboldt’s 100th birthday in 1869. Agassiz fretted about every detail, and was adamant that it be carried off perfectly – in other words, to his own satisfaction.

Agassiz’s career-long competition with English naturalist Charles Darwin was focused on a few distinct areas of contention, including Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection, in which Darwin emphasized an evolutionary process for the adaptation of species dependent on their mobility. Agassiz, although particularly religious, believed that though man was mobile, species of animals were not, and that they developed where God placed them.

Darwin, “a sharp observer of other people’s foibles,” saw Agassiz’s work as “contemptible rubbish” and also compared him to one of the jellyfish Agassiz obsessively researched and chronicled: “weird, infinitely interesting, capable of inflicting a certain amount of harm, but destined ultimately to fade into insubstantiality.” Regarding Agassiz’s Charleston folly, Darwin sarcastically wrote to his cousin William Darwin Fox, “Agassiz lectures in the US in which he has been maintaining the doctrine of several species – much, I daresay, to the comfort of the slave-holding Southerns.”

Over his academic career, Agassiz earned another unfortunate reputation: that of a stingy, domineering, and credit-stealing professor who both alienated and smothered the ambitions of legions of students and research assistants. Here, Irmscher has exhaustively examined numerous letters and journals (the book contains 44 pages of endnotes) of former protégés such as Charles Girard and Édouard Desor, who worked and studied with Agassiz at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and Henry James Clark and Addison Emery Verrill, who were both assistants to Agassiz at Harvard. Agassiz’s rancorous yet fascinating episodes with these young men were marked by common themes of professional jealousy, theft of what would now be called “intellectual property,” and bitter personal attacks.

Particularly revealing (as well as heartbreaking) is the case of Clark, who toiled in penury within Agassiz’s shadow for years as an “Adjunct” professor helping to organize Agassiz’s career-long ambition, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Clark, shortchanged both in credit and in remuneration, was eventually pushed out of his position by the Harvard Corporation after a very public quarrel with Agassiz. And in the case of Girard – who came to regret following his “flawed master” Agassiz from Switzerland to America and eventually defected to Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian, headed by Spencer Fullerton Baird – Agassiz could not help but badmouth his former student to Baird, saying that Girard had “no judgment,” was “obstinate as a mule,” and needed to be led with “a high hand and kept in an entirely subordinate position.”

When it comes to his books, Agassiz’s "Études sur les Glaciers" (1840), is outstanding, not only for its scholarship, but also for its exceptionally beautiful, lithographed atlas volume. But for all its beauty and scientific importance, the name of Agassiz’s friend and fellow glaciologist, Karl Friedrich Schimper, is absent from its pages. Even the initial use of the term “ice age” (eitzeit), Agassiz cribbed from Schimper. As Irmscher asserts, this was “the first prominent instance of the cavalier, unattributed use of other people’s ideas that, in the eyes of Agassiz’ critics, would become a hallmark of his career.”

And in a supreme act of hypocrisy added to what Irmscher terms “a similar mix of ruthlessness and ... naiveté,” Agassiz, who thought that another, contemporary author, Jean de Charpentier, had pre-empted his "Études," wrote of his “disappointment” that Charpentier “hadn’t used his [Agassiz’s] observations in order to establish ‘synonymy’ between ‘your theory and mine.’” Embarrassment was obviously not in Agassiz’s lexicon.

There is no question that Agassiz’s shadow looms large in numerous scientific disciplines. But Irmscher’s devastating new appraisal pushes Agassiz out of that shadow and into the klieg lights – leaving all the hagiographic and illusive imagery behind. In the book's epilogue, Irmscher writes, “The history of science is unforgiving; it remembers those who were right and commits to the dustbin those who were wrong. And Agassiz certainly was, dead wrong, about evolution and about race.” What this groundbreaking book distills is ugly and very disturbing; but ultimately, it is the necessary and timely exposure of a great man who in truth really wasn’t.

[Deborah Cramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegant, insightful, compelling. From Rebecca Stott's New York Times Book Review: "During the California earthquake of 1906, the marble statue of Louis Agassiz toppled off the second story of Stanford University’s zoology building and plunged headfirst into the ground. The great scientist, with his head buried in concrete, his upturned body sticking up into air, became an iconic image of the earthquake. Agassiz is often remembered as a fallen man, Christoph Irmscher tells us. His rejection of Darwinian evolution and his conviction that America belonged to the whites only are an embarrassment to science. A decade ago, an eighth grader at the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Mass., came across a description of Agassiz’s racism and suggested the school change its name. It did, calling itself after the school’s first African-¬American principal, Maria L. Baldwin.
“Distinctly undelightful” is how Irmscher describes Agassiz in this evocative new biography. He confesses that he struggled to reconcile the prejudices, the authoritarianism and the brilliance of his subject, asking, “Can we love Agassiz?” It is a strange and complex question. “Do we need to love Agassiz?” we might reply. But the question, though odd, is a particular one in science biography. Agassiz and his peers stand in the shadow of Darwin’s extraordinarily liberal, kindly, generous good nature. Alongside Darwin, some of these men look selfish, mean-minded and bigoted. They are difficult to like.
But irreconcilable contradictions make for interesting biographies. And Irmscher doesn’t allow the “undelightful” aspects to disappear in the service of myth making. Instead, he draws out the complexities of his subject and helps us to see them as part of the fabric of 19th-century science. There’s no airbrushing in “Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.”
The subtitle of the book is perhaps a touch overstated, however. Scientific discoveries of that era, as we now know, weren’t made by individuals but by communities, networks, institutions and changing attitudes.
Nonetheless, there is no arguing with the claim that Agassiz, a Swiss immigrant, was pivotal to the making of American science. He was “one of the first,” Irmscher writes, “to establish science as a collective enterprise.” He was extraordinarily prolific and influential in many fields, including paleontology, zoology, geology and glaciology. He pioneered field research and was among the first to propose that the Earth had endured an ice age. A charismatic teacher whose students in natural history went on to become the teachers and scientists of the next generation, he was also an obsessive collector, enlisting the American public in a vast campaign to send him natural history specimens so he could build a remarkable museum of comparative anatomy.
The range of Agassiz’s interests and expertise seems remarkable to a modern reader, given the narrow specialties of contemporary scientific practice, but in many ways, it was this restless curiosity that made him a transitional figure. He may have forged the path for research as a profession ensconced in universities endowed with posts and chairs, but he also belonged to the older age of the -polymathic natural philosopher.
Unlike Darwin, Agassiz did not leave thousands of letters and journals and health records with which biographers have been able to piece together the intricate interior life of their subject. He was too busy. At the same time, however, he was keen to promote himself in particular ways, revealing a degree of control over his image that Irmscher describes as self-mythologizing. The dominant image he sought to promote was of a man who never stopped working, who had prodigious energy but who was also prone to bouts of nervous exhaustion from overwork.
In the absence of personal records, Irmscher draws instead on other sources, including accounts by students who depict Agassiz as an authoritarian teacher who expected his pupils to toe his line. When they took their own directions, as some famously did, or complained that Agassiz took credit for their work, their careers floundered. The diary entries of young men struggling to make a career for themselves in an apparently meritocratic environment but one, in actuality, tightly controlled and hierarchical are fascinating and moving.
Then there is the Agassiz who believed in absolute white superiority. He was not the only 19th-century American with such views, of course, but his confidence in the scientific basis of his beliefs shored up the racist attitudes of the time. He was obsessed with miscegenation, which Irmscher suggests insightfully may have been driven by his need to “align himself, as an immigrant, as firmly as he could with other whites of European descent in America, the need to construct a genealogy for himself that would make the New World seem rather old indeed.”
Finally Agassiz is also remembered as a thorn in the side of Darwin and his followers. He is often blamed for the fact that evolutionary theory took such a long time to be accepted in the United States. Irmscher, however, claims that in effect it was Agassiz’s “surprisingly emotional, scattershot opposition” to developmentalism that prompted influential scientists, who might otherwise have done some fence sitting, to promote Darwinism. Darwin watched as always ruefully from the sidelines. “How very singular it is,” he wrote in a letter at the time, “that so eminently clever a man, with such immense knowledge on many branches of Natural History, should write such wonderful stuff & bosh as he does.”
Irmscher is a richly descriptive writer with an eye for detail, the complexities and contradictions of character, and the workings of institutional and familial power structures. He attends ¬closely to the people in Agassiz’s circle and teases out how his wives and students in particular adapted to or rejected his maddening idiosyncrasies. Elizabeth Agassiz, his second wife — and a naturalist, author, illustrator and popularizer of science — shines in this account. She was not just an assistant and helpmeet, but also an increasingly independent and skeptical presence in his life.
Irmscher may have struggled to reconcile the “distinctly undelightful” aspects of Agassiz’s character with his subject’s manifest achievements, but to his credit, he aims his spotlight straight at these very problems, revealing their effects not only on Agassiz’s immediate family and students but on the evolution of American science. This is a book not just about a man of science but also about a scientific culture in the making — warts and all."
Rebecca Stott is the author of “Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution.”

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-written account of a rather unpleasant man. Louis Agassiz was an innovative museum curator and scholar of glaciers, but he lost the battle against Darwinian evolution, and his racist views were grotesque, if unfortunately normal for his era. The book loses some momentum in the last 100 pages, and I would have liked further discussion of Agassiz's religious views. The last chapter, on Agassiz's second wife and co-author Elizabeth, could provide the basis for a spinoff book.

[Shallee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written biography. Even with this sympathetic treatment by Irmscher, it wasn't easy to like Aggasiz. The interplay between Agassiz and contemporary luminaries, including Asa Gray, Thoreau, etc. is fascinating. And, then, of course, there is Darwin.

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Louis Agassiz was instrumental in establishing a tradition of "reading nature, not books", that continues, in a way, today. It is vital that new and established scientists make their own observations rather than rely just on the observations of others.

The legacy of Louis Agassiz is in the fact that he promoted this view to professionals and amateur naturalists alike, and that he established one of the first field schools of natural history in the USA - why didn't the author include more on this? Agassiz was a great promoter of natural history, though he ended up on the wrong side of just about every major scientific argument of his day and today...and is thus largely forgotten and overlooked.

OK, about this book.

Frankly, I am happy to be done with it. Irmscher tackled an interesting topic and grew it larger than it needed to be. It's obvious that he loved learning and then telling Agassiz's story...so much so that I really had to work to tease Agassiz's story out of this widely meandering narrative.

Irmischer takes long, distracting detours into the lives and exploits of many of Agassiz's mentors, family, peers, adversaries, and students. This book could easily have been titled something like "Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, and insights and reflections on everyone he knew." In other words, Irmscher wedged what could have been a completely satisfying 150-200 page biography into 350 pages.

I do not doubt that Agassiz is much like Irmscher describes him - driven, a good observer, someone who loves the spotlight, a creationist, a racist, and a controlling overlord of his domains and of all the people in it and of all the work they did there.

Aside from the development of the Ice Age theory, what was Louis Agassiz's greatest contribution to American science? I'd have to say it was his son, Alexander...who eventually broke with just about every scientific and social stance taken by Louis.

In summary, I found the writing to be overdone, tough to slide through, and IMO too distracting as I worked to follow Louis Agassiz's story. I will probably add this title to my library rather than recycling it, but I can't really imagine who I would recommend it to.

Sadly, my experience with it resulted in only a couple of stars.

[Don Friedman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Biography of Louis Agassiz - I knew almost nothing about him, so I learned quite a lot about him, about his nearly rock star status and influence in science in the 19th century, his key role in change the nature of science education, his stature at Harvard and role in the development of science instruction and research there. Also about his not great treatment of his first wife, and the very significant role played by his second wife, Elizabeth, who helped create a market for popular science writing for interested non-scientists. Agassiz was also somewhat relentlessly ambitious and self-serving and aggrandizing, and seems to have been a frequently awful boss to his students and interns. And he held firm in two areas where history proved him dreadfully wrongheaded - a lifetime rivalry with Darwin and a fervent denial in theories of evolution, and misguided views about the significance of racial variations, though perhaps not far out of line with much of the thinking of his day.

My reservations about the book had to do with the writing style. I have to admit I was put off by the effort to make the book - I guess - feel informal and modern by using colloquial and very recent terminology and expressions. Not that I need things to be dry and academic, but I found it off-putting. I also struggled somewhat with the organization of the book. He takes on themes, like Darwin, race and his wife, in separate chapters, in a way that to me took a way from a sense of chronology and a rounded life. But I learned a lot...

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a biography of the absolute now: its methods feel incredibly current, from the way is seeks to "read" the glacial scratches that Agassiz identifies, to the textual exegesis is gives to Agassiz's comments on race, interpreting them not only as themselves but also as a part of a discourse of white supremacy (it's like the grad school answer to claims "you had to unerstand the times," and it's even harsher for that), or the way it very symapthetically, and a little playfully, reads Elizabeth's Agassiz's travel journals of the trip to Galapagos. This is a very text rich, text-interested biography.

Which, as much as I admired it, I found a little exhausting. Irmscher kept crowding himself and his insights between me and his subject. It might be different if this was my fourth biography of Agassiz, but it's not, it's my first. I saw a lot of the writer's insight and process, and was impressed, but feel like I didn't get a handle on the man at the center in any holistic way.

I admire this book, but don't quite love it.

[Dr Susan Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

We may not 'love' Louis Agassiz as he was clearly a 'flawed' soul by modern standards but we must thank him. His love of nature and curiosity did lead him to a scientific life and gave us the major starting point for the study of fossil fishes as well as one of the most important institutions on the planet - the MCZ at Harvard University, Cambridge. Christopher Irmscher's book reveals much of the man and has been a great source for understanding his role in early 19th century science in America as well as the relationships with women, which I was seeking for our exploration of women's contribution to vertebrate palaeontology (see Rebels, Scholars & Explorers by Annalisa Berta and Susan Turner, JHUP, Oct. 2020). I learnt much about his first wife Cecilie Braun. Well worth reading even if not all at one go!

[Christoph Irmscher · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the New York Times Review by Rebecca Stott:"Irmscher is a richly descriptive writer with an eye for detail, the complexities and contradictions of character, and the workings of institutional and familial power structures. This is a book not just about a man of science but also about a scientific culture in the making." Read the full review here.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and literary perspective on a scientific icon whose legacy is shaded by Agassiz's racism, ego, and competitiveness. By profiling Agassiz's second wife, students and peers, Irmscher provides multiple perspectives, which at times makes the book itself feel like it has multiple personality disorder. This is not an intimate biography from the view inside Agassiz's head, but a sketch made from a distance. Still, it is a valuable contribution to the history of contemporary science.

[Vagabond Geologist · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a disappointing book! After slogging through this book about the "creator of American science" I know little more about the man or his contributions to the development if scientific thought in America (or anywhere else) than I did before I opened the book. I'm afraid this one will go into the box of books destined for Goodwill.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always wanted to read a bio on Louis Agassiz but hadn't found one until now. So it turns out he was pretty much a jerk, but he did love nature and felt one could become closer to the divine by studying it. It's hard to find out someone you've heard so much about doesn't live up to the hype.