Reef madness, p.7
Reef Madness, page 7
Even sans animaux, the place remained busy, for Cary and Agas-siz, a sort of elite dream couple, became a node of Cambridge and Boston’s social world. With Cary’s help, Louis had conquered Brahmin Boston as thoroughly as he had Harvard. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in for a Boston visit from his own web in Concord, had heard enough of Louis from Thoreau and others that he knew him at first sight: “I saw in the cars a broad-featured, unctuous man, fat and plenteous as some successful politician, and pretty soon divined it must be the foreign professor who has had so marked a success in all our scientific and social circles, having established unquestionable leadership in them all; and it was Agassiz.”
4
Emerson soon joined the circle, becoming part of Louis’s elite Saturday Club. On other nights, Cabots, Feltons, and Lowells came for dinner, and the place often swarmed with less formal visitors. Alex sometimes came home from school to find his father jawing with the great mathematician Benjamin Peirce, who lived across Quincy Street from Agassiz and became a close friend. Their bond seemed one of opposites. Peirce was a ferociously unapologetic intellectual elitist (he once delighted in being publicly called a nabob), a notoriously opaque lecturer, and a brilliant mathematician, while Louis espoused intellectual egalitarianism, lectured with singular lucidity and could scarcely add. But they agreed that the universe was a divine creation, that it could be understood by those few who could perceive the rules of God’s order, and that they ranked high among those few. Peirce, amused that his computationally challenged friend had a mathematically talented son, would often conjure some math puzzle for Alex. Alex usually solved it, which suggests both his intelligence and Peirce’s feelings for him, for Peirce could stump anyone and usually chose to. Alex would witness an even more unpredictable mixture of lucidity and obscurity when the Saturday Club gathered, with Agassiz and Peirce joined by John Lowell, Longfel low, Emerson, and other luminaries who would talk deep into the night.
In this setting Alex began a part of his life more peaceful and productive, though hardly boring or routine. Once past his initial shy ness and difficulties with English, he quickly made friends with his fellow students and the children of Cary’s friends. In winter he liked to skate, and in summers he accompanied his father, stepmother, and sisters to Nahant, an island northeast of Boston where the Cabots and other blue bloods summered. There he developed a love of marine biology that grew all his life. He and his sisters sometimes accompanied their father and Cary on collecting or lecturing trips farther a field. In his first years in the United States, Alex traveled up and down the eastern seaboard; to the Gulf Coast; to the Florida Keys for the 1851 reef study; to South Carolina the following two winters when his father had lecturing stints in Charleston; and to many universities and scientific institutions between Boston and Washington,
D.C. By the time he was halfway through college, he was an accomplished field worker and had met most of the country’s scientific elite.
Alex took great advantage of the opportunities this new world offered, resisting distraction and showing remarkable resilience and concentration. Already he could work as few others could. The youth was showing the characteristics that would distinguish the man: “The thoroughness and ease with which he worked, his great reserve, his sudden explosions of indignation, his quiet and entire devotion to those he loved, his occasional outbursts of mirth, as delightful as they were unexpected, his unfailing charm–all these belonged to the Swiss boy no less than to the scientific man of cosmopolitan friendship and fame.”
Enrolling at Cambridge High School soon after he arrived, he graduated two years later, in spring 1851, at fifteen. That fall he entered Harvard. He excelled in all sciences and in math, having more luck than most in following Peirce’s lectures. Yet while he spoke five languages, he showed little interest in studying any of them, and he assiduously avoided philosophy. Like Peirce, who loved math because it was the most rigorous instrument for testing theories, Alex sought knowledge where it could be found and confirmed with most certainty. As his son would later phrase it, “He devoted himself to the knowable, and left groping among the intangibles to others.”
We can only wonder how much of this agnosticism was a reaction to his father’s promiscuous theorizing. Each side of Alex’s family had harboured doers as well as thinkers (Cécile had a second brother who was a mining engineer, and Louis’s brother was a merchant), so perhaps Alex merely inherited a practical bent. Yet it invites speculation that a youth so exposed to philosophical inquiry should seem averse to it. His uncle Alexander, Alex’s most substantial intellectual influence in the years before he came to America, was an adherent of Naturphilosophie, and Louis, though claiming a strict empiricism, spun elaborate speculative structures from his findings and talked to no end of philosophical matters.
Alex steered decidedly clear of all this, even as an undergraduate, when such musings come most naturally. This hard-nosed literal-mindedness, which he would retain all his life, fit firmly into an apparent abjuration of his father’s excesses. Where Louis was loud, impulsive, expansive, and distractible, Alex was quiet, steady, held his cards close, and worked with a diligence–actually finishing things–that his father had sustained only briefly and only in his youth. Perhaps when one has a father as flamboyant as Louis Agassiz, the best rebellion is quiet conservatism. Or perhaps Alex simply saw the trouble Louis’s extravagance created and chose a more controlled path. He had certainly suffered enough shocks riding Louis’s.
In any case, Alex approached his schoolwork with remarkable energy and discipline. While not the bon vivant his father was, he had a quieter sort of charm beneath his subdued, acutely attentive demeanor. One friend he made in South Carolina the winter of 1851–1852, a young woman four years older than he (twenty to his six teen), recalled later that “he was so different from other boys, and so delightful, a most charming boy–just at the age when boys are so seldom charming.” Though reserved, he was confident socially. Having long produced small plays with his sisters, he joined Harvard’s Hasty Pudding theatrical club, and he rowed bow on a famed crew that also included Charles William Eliot, who as president of the university from 1869 to 1909 would become one of the most important figures in American higher education. (At only medium height and around 140 pounds, Alex would seem an unlikely oars man, but he had impressive physical strength all his life.)
Living in the big Quincy Street house with his family, going to class across the street with his father and his father’s colleagues during the day, Alex did not exactly move beyond his father’s sphere while attending college, nor beyond the complications arising from Louis’s chronic overextension. As his college years ended, Alex found himself teaching in a girls’ prep school that Liz Cary had founded. Cary started the school partly out of a strong interest in education (she later became Radcliff College’s first president) but also because Louis, even with his new salary and lucrative speaking calendar, was again spending more than he earned. Cary, determined to provide a household income independent of Louis’s, set up the Agassiz Girls’ School and recruited Alex to teach there. He dutifully took the job even while he studied chemistry briefly and then reenrol led in the Lawrence Scientific School for another graduate degree, this one in natural history. For the next two years, he fit a half-time teaching position at the girls’ school amid his studies.
Many twenty-year-old men would relish holding forth before rooms full of bright young women, but Alex hated it. Unlike his father, he found teaching neither easy nor enjoyable. In fact he seemed increasingly resistant to the charms of both academe and natural history as professions. He told his close friend and classmate Theodore Lyman that he had entered engineering school because he didn’t want to be a poor biologist or have to teach all his life. Now, as he finished his natural history degree, that sense of entrapment seemed to resurface: He had his degree (three, in fact–an undergrad degree in zoology and master’s equivalents in engineering and natural history) but faced the sort of under funded, overextended existence he so hated seeing in his father. He was also in love, having fallen for one of his students, Anna Russell, the daughter of blue-blooded family friends. He wanted to marry her, but the thought of doing so and then staying on at the museum and making ends meet by teaching, either at the girls’ school or at his father’s school, felt constricting.
Louis set up an escape route: Alexander Dallas Bach, a good friend of his who was the director of the U.S. Coast Survey, happened to need a capable, sea-legged scientist and engineer to help survey the Pacific Northwest coast. It was a connection job, but Alex, educated in geology, oceanography, and engineering and an experienced coastal cruiser, was superbly qualified. The position sounded promising. Bache, emphasizing the military and commercial advantages of well-surveyed waters, had drawn massive government resources to the survey, and its work was highly regarded. But the cruise Alex went on during the fall of 1859 suffered such bad weather, and Alex so resented the bureaucratic inefficiencies of a government operation, that when cold weather halted operations for a time he took a leave rather than seek another immediate assignment.
In San Francisco, waiting for a boat to start the long trip home via Panama (which still had to be crossed overland), he spent almost a month catching, drawing, and cataloging perch and medusae. He became so absorbed that he didn’t want to leave, and indeed he did not leave until he had written dozens of pages of description to “moncher papa” and a monograph on West Coast perch. Then, perhaps deterred by the thought of returning to Boston’s winter, he accepted an invitation from the superintendent of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, whom he had befriended on his westward passage over the isthmus, to be his guest in Acapulco and Panama. In both places he did yet more collecting and wrote more long letters to Louis, scores of pages of lovely pen work and maps and drawings of sea creatures–medusae, crabs, crustaceans, sea worms and sea slugs, shrimp–each numbered and tied to a description at letter’s end. They were casual, newsy letters home, but they were also natural history papers almost ready for publication, and he in fact later revised and published several.
His Coastal Survey job, meanwhile, remained available. But as the weeks passed, the job held less attraction. Though the work was sometimes exciting, the pay was poor, and he missed his fiancée. As he collected, cataloged, drew, and described, it became clear that engineering, whatever its practical and pecuniary attractions, would never hold him the way biology did. Like a boat coming around, his thoughts and plans turned toward home, and more seriously toward marriage.
The only problem was money. Anna Russell came from yet another rich merchant family, but she and Alex had agreed they should live independently. She had even reduced her spending in his absence, as if in preparation for a naturalist’s budget. But though she was willing to sacrifice some comfort, neither she nor Alex was ready to live penniless. He needed a salary.
Here Theodore Lyman stepped in. Like many of the friends Alex had made through family and school, Lyman was rich, and as a fellow zoologist and graduate of the Scientific School he saw natural history as a vital enterprise. He also felt (as Henry Adams would echo years later) that Alex was the best of the class both at Harvard and the Scientific School. It bothered him that a lack of funds should keep his gifted friend from pursuing science. Lyman knew of Louis’s chronic, maddening overextension and his erratic ways, and he felt sad to see how Alex suffered them. So he proposed a solution. Louis Agassiz had finally talked Harvard, along with the Massachusetts legislature and several private donors (including the Lyman family), into financing the establishment of a permanent museum for the Scientific School’s growing collections. Construction on the Museum of Comparative Zoology had in fact begun while Alex was away. This new museum would need curators to organize its collections, and Lyman had already volunteered to serve as a curator of mollusks. Facing an arduous task (for Louis had acquired many, many mollusks), Lyman convinced Alex to let him fund another curatorial position so that Alex could work alongside him. Lyman put up fifteen hundred dollars a year (the sum Harvard had offered Louis just ten years before). This was not a plush salary and would require that Alex (and Russell, after they married) live with Louis and Liz Cary for a while to make ends meet. But it was a start.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fixity
I
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.
