Professor Of The World’s Wonders (February 1961 | Volume: 12, Issue: 2)

Professor Of The World’s Wonders

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Authors: Louise Hall Tharp

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February 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 2

Louis Agassiz, the enthusiastic Swiss naturalist, appeared on the American scene at exactly the right time and place. The place was Boston, the time, the mid-nineteenth century. Science was beginning to challenge religious concepts long held sacred. Public attention was increasingly directed toward scientific advance and toward the study of nature. Now came Agassiz, the scientist “with the Gallic power of pleasing,” to demonstrate that the physical world was full of wonders and undiscovered secrets. It was just the thing that practical, intelligent young Americans were seeking: a new frontier—a glacial theory, expeditions to Brazil, mountain peaks to scale, and ocean depths to plumb. Agassiz was eager to teach, and he found an America eager to be taught.

It was as a scientist of recognized brilliance that Agassiz came to the United States in 1846. Just under forty, he had written and published his Recherches sur les poissons fossiles more than ten years before. He had received a doctorate in zoology in 1829 and a medical degree in 1830. At twenty five he was appointed lecturer and curator at the University of Neuchâtel, and during the fourteen years he was there, the small Swiss institution had become a major scientific center. By the time he left Switzerland, Agassiz had about 175 publications to his credit, including twenty books with some two thousand excellent plates. He had already formulated his revolutionary glacial hypothesis, having become infected with the idea of an ice age, a whole pre-historic continent under a sheet of ice—powerful, inexorable, carrying great jagged rocks upon its surface, and grinding rock to pebbles and sand beneath it.

King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, continuing his predecessor’s support of Agassiz, now awarded the scientist sufficient funds to travel to America and continue his work on glaciers. Agassiz went, and with the aid of Charles Lyell, an eminent English geologist, soon obtained the esteemed Lowell lectureship at Harvard. It was his first public appearance in this country, and at once he captured the popular imagination.

“Plan of the Creation, especially in the Animal Kingdom” was the name of the series of lectures he gave for the Lowell Institute, and the scope suggested by the title was typical of the man. He demonstrated what were then new ideas concerning the great age of the earth, using his studies of marine fossils to demonstrate the long passage of time and his observations of Alpine glaciers to prove his point. Some clergymen denounced him for extending the seven days of Genesis to the eras of geological time—but there was no shorter road to fame than to be denounced in Boston.

To the over-capacity crowds that flocked to hear him in Boston and all along the eastern seaboard, Agassiz spoke with a strong foreign accent, one of the many fables about him being that he had learned just enough English to deliver his lectures. This was not strictly true. He never would abandon his accent, however, being too much