Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science by Christoph Irmscher

Warts and all without the all

One often comes across references to Louis Agassiz while reading 19th century books on science, history, and literature. Wanting to learn more about this scientist of eminent renown, I turned to Christoph Irmscher’s 2013 book Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science. The book’s honorific subtitle leads one to believe that this is going to be a biography of Agassiz that emphasizes his career accomplishments. Instead, this book discusses Agassiz’s life and career in a series of thematic chapters, each of which focuses on one of his egregious faults. He abandoned his first wife. He treated his grad students like garbage. He was obsessed with his own popularity. He stole the credit for others’ scientific achievements. His arguments against Darwinism were ridiculous. He was a racist. And his wife did most of his writing. I’m all in favor of a balanced, warts-and-all treatment of a historical figure’s life. It can also be fun and educational to tear down monuments, but the problem with this book is that Irmscher never bothers to erect Agassiz’s statue before he starts pulling it down.

The one thing I hoped to learn from this book was never really satisfied: Why was Agassiz such an acclaimed scientist and so popular with the general public? What exactly did he discover or accomplish in his career that was so important? He studied glaciers in Switzerland, but from Irmscher’s account I don’t really see any monumental discovery that would cause Agassiz to be mentioned in the same league with Humboldt or Darwin. As for his opposition to evolution, Agassiz believed that species were created as is by God, but this was done in a series of successive periodic stages, which accounts for the extent of the fossil record. I really don’t understand the fundamental mechanics of this theory because Irmscher starts picking apart Agassiz’s beliefs before he even thoroughly explains them, which makes it difficult for the reader to understand why so many people, scientists included, bought into such a tenuous and unworkable theory even after Darwin had published On the Origin of Species. Agassiz is described as a great lecturer, and he published well-illustrated books on jellyfish. Was that enough to make him a scientific celebrity like some sort of Neil deGrasse Tyson of the 19th century? I wish Irmscher had built up Agassiz’s résumé a little more before ripping it to shreds. He just assumes the reader is already familiar with Agassiz’s accomplishments, but I doubt that’s the case for most 21st-century readers.

Irmscher is a literary scholar and an expert on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was an associate of Agassiz, so he is very knowledgable about the time period and the intelligentsia of this era. Irmscher doesn’t approach Agassiz’s life from the perspective of a scientist or even a historian but rather through the lens of a literary critic. Much of the content of the book comes from Irmscher’s deep reading of texts, in which he often fixates on certain word choices, which he then uses to construct psychological profiles of the authors. Chapters frequently begin with an interesting biographical vignette on Agassiz, Mrs. Agassiz, or one of their colleagues, but then get bogged down in tedious textual analysis that’s less about what these people are saying in their diaries and letters and more about how they are saying it.

Irmscher’s critical study will likely be valuable to scholars in his field, if for no other reason than the sheer level of detail provided. For general readers looking for an education on Agassiz, however, this is not the biography its title implies. In the end, I regret having spent several hours reading a book about a man whom I don’t admire, respect, agree with, and probably wouldn’t have liked, without having learned why I was supposed to find him so important in the first place.
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Famous Men of Science by Sarah Knowles Bolton

A tasty sampler platter of biographical appetizers
Famous Men of Science, published in 1889, is a collection of 14 biographical sketches written by American author Sarah Knowles Bolton. In the late 19th century, Bolton published a whole series of such biographical collections, with titles like Poor Boys Who Became Famous, Famous American Statesmen, and Famous European Artists. Although it doesn’t appear to be intended for a young audience, Famous Men of Science is definitely a popular history aimed at the masses. The biographical sketches have the feeling of deliberate simplification, like articles out of Reader’s Digest or something from Chicken Soup for the Scientific Soul. Given this approach, it’s hard to tell how much of the information is reliable, and how much is folklore, but Bolton does quote extensively from the letters and diaries of the figures she profiles.

While relating the events and accomplishments of her subjects’ lives, Bolton makes blatant efforts to draw moral lessons from their examples, often concluding paragraphs with chestnuts like “Those only succeed who have sufficient force of character to make time for what they wish to do,” or “Little can be expected from those who are easily satisfied.” She also goes out of her way to emphasize the Christian piety and spiritual fortitude of these scientific heroes, even the ones who were likely materialists. She has a tendency to digress from the scientific research by focusing on stories of love, friendship, and family. In the chapter on Sir Humphrey Davy, for instance, Bolton concentrates so much on his personal character and relationships that I’m not sure I even understand what his great contributions to science were. Bolton just assumes you already know that, as any good student of the 19th century would.

Nevertheless, you do learn a lot of fascinating details about these individuals, like Galileo’s struggles to support a family of deadbeats, or the fact that Louis Agassiz was so blind he had to feel fossils with his tongue. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, had a very successful career as an artist prior to becoming an inventor, and Bolton gives his artistic accomplishments their proper due. I consider myself pretty well-versed in the life of Charles Darwin, but I knew almost nothing about the personal histories of Carl Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier, or Alexander von Humboldt. Though Bolton’s sketches are anything but comprehensive, she has provided me with enough information to know that I’d like to look into the works of these great naturalists and seek out more recent and complete biographies on them.

Despite the weaknesses in the writing, and the egregious number of typos in the ebook (no spelling check was ever applied to the scanned text), this really is an enjoyable read. It transports you back to the glory days of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, prior to the era of specialization, when science was like the Wild West: full of opportunities for anyone willing to work hard and stake their claim. You didn’t need rigid credentials to make advances in a given discipline; you just did the work. Almost all of these luminaries excelled in more than one field. Humboldt’s range of interests was truly staggering, stretching across almost the entire breadth of the sciences and humanities. It’s difficult to imagine any scientist today having the freedom to explore the diversity of knowledge that these men did. Famous Men of Science is a fun read for anyone who admires these polymaths of the past. It is no substitute for real biographies of Newton, Herschel, Audubon, etc., but it really does generate enthusiasm for the history of science and whets your appetite for more. 
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