CHRISTOPH IRMSCHER 

Author and Critic

In a sonnet written immediately after Louis Agassiz’s death in December 1873, the Dante translator and Boston dentist Thomas William Parsons without further ado defined Agassiz’s lasting importance through the service he had done the nation by reconciling religious vision and scientific fact:

What made the greatness of our great man gone?
Facts about fishes?—reading laws that rule
The glacier’s marche [sic] and move the black moraine?
An eye whose gaze with equal reverence glowed
At a small star-fish, or his Alpine throne?
Or that he founded for our land a school?—
Never to see that harvest which he sowed!—
His large companionship with man, shell, stone,
And every type of the most High? The fool
Who thinketh in his heart there is no God
Stands here in silence. ’Mid our tears and pain
This joy was uppermost: beneath His rod
Bowing, we bless Him for each nobler mind
Whose highest vision science fails to blind.

December 1873 T. W. Parsons

Not his taxonomic achievements (Agassiz first made a name for himself as an expert on Brazilian ichthyology and the fossilized fish of Europe), not his pioneering work in glaciology or marine biology mattered to Parsons, nor the fact that Agassiz had put Harvard on the map as a center of scientific research, not even the warm relations he had maintained, according to Parsons, with all manner of created things. For him, Agassiz was more than merely human.  Read More 

He had gone to Europe to write poetry, after years in the dusty classrooms of Harvard. Here he was, in Florence, reading the newspaper, fretting about the state of the world and America in particular, on a December day in 1873. Winter in Italy, it turned out, was still winter. James Russell Lowell, formerly the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard College, a distinguished editor and critic, had quit his job almost a year ago. He had leased his house to a friend and packed his bags to go abroad. France had been a pleasure, as always, but now he was in Florence, biding his time, waiting for inspiration to strike. His mood was down. He glanced casually at the paper before him, when suddenly it seemed that the earth around him was beginning to shake. Read More 

Elizabeth Agassiz became the first President of Radcliffe College in 1894, after what was previously called "the Annex" had been incorporated by the state of Massachusetts. On the surface, the Annex was not much more than the college version of the School for Girls she had run, in the 1850s, in the attic of her husband's home on Quincy Street. She had been associated with the Annex since 1879, when a group of women got together at the house of Mr. Arthur Gilman at 5 Philips Place in Cambridge and nominated her to be a member of a committee to sponsor a school for young women, to be taught by Harvard faculty. Little did Elizabeth know then that a later incarnation of this group, now called "Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women," would vote her into the presidency of a college.

Indeed, much of the founders’ efforts in the early history of Radcliffe College went into denying that they ever had anything serious in mind. As one former student, Mary de Quedville Briggs, ’84 (who got her official Radcliffe degree in ‘01), declared when sending back a questionnaire she had received from Radcliffe’s fledgling alumnae association: “The Annex was not founded; like Topsy, it ‘Just growed.’”  Read More 

Also in my collection is a little note in Agassiz’s thin, spidery handwriting, so fine that it seems more feminine than that of his wife, a note scribbled hastily on a small sheet of stationery, just a half page ripped off a larger sheet, as one would expect from someone who was socareless with his own things. The ink has faded over the years, as has the knowledge of the occasion on which this note was written. More than halfway down the left side of the page appears the name of the addressee, “George Ticknor, Esquire,” the former Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard University, who had devoted the later part of his career to helping establish the Boston Public Library. “My dear Sir,” Agassiz had written to Ticknor on 22 October 1859, exactly a month before the publication Darwin’s Origin of Species, “I am a little too early, excuse me if I am a little late at 1 ocl.” He signed the note, “12 ocl. Ever truly yours, L. Agassiz.” Having come too early at twelve o’clock, he had left again, apparently resigning himself to the prospect that upon his return at one o’ clock, he’d be late.

It’s hard not to think of this note as emblematic of Agassiz’s life, too. He was too early for his own good in some ways, in imagining science as an activity which could be practiced by everybody, as a collaboration between several investigators, as an enterprise requiring money and fundraising skills, where the right set of moves would determine the right outcome. And he was unforgivably late in other ways, in his conviction, for example, that nature was made for human purposes only or in his skewed view that blacks were inferior to whites. And while he firmly believed—and staked his career on making that belief a reality—that science was something to be practiced by the many, he also believed that the results of such collaborative activity really belonged to only one: namely Agassiz himself. The trivial note to Ticknor thus acquires a more complex meaning. For this is how Louis Agassiz appears in my forthcoming biography: a visionary in some ways, he was a hopeless reactionary in others--truly a multi-dimensional character.  Read More