He left a mark on the development and the practice of American science, and brought science to "the man in the street" as no one else had before. People from all over the world read his books, sent him specimens, and asked his advice. By the time of his death, on December 14, , he was the most famous scientist in America, and although he actually published few major scientific works after he emigrated, his popular books and public lectures made him extremely well-known and respected by the public.
Scientifically, however, he was being left behind by his absolute rejection of evolution and his insistence on glaciers as a major force that shaped geology worldwide. Agassiz was also being left behind by his racist attitudes, which were extreme even for his day. In the early and mids there was considerable scientific debate about the origins of humans and of human races, and about just how different human groups were. Unlike Darwin and others, who thought that humans all belonged to one species and that their populations had differentiated through time as they spread geographically and adapted to new environments, Agassiz could not accept that all groups of humans belonged to the same species, and he argued vehemently for the inferiority of non-white human groups.
He was not alone in this; several prominent scientists saw populational differences as major and discontinuous, and used various statistical and other arguments to support this. But Agassiz was also physically revulsed by the idea that all humans were equal. In this feeling he was not alone, but increasingly he was seen as the product of a bygone age himself.
His philosophy of nature, aiming to understand the Divine Plan, is the last great expression of the old school of natural theology, started by men like John Ray almost two hundred years before. Natural theology had once inspired countless scientists, including Darwin and his forerunners, but by the time of publication of The Origin of Species it had largely run out of steam, unable to offer any real explanation for natural phenomena except "God made it that way.
Like many biological generalizations, there are too many exceptions to its principles to use it as a strict guide. Today we would like to think of the struggle between the supporters and opponents of evolution as a duel between progressives and reactionaries, but this is not how things played out in the nineteenth century. And he never relented either. Gray, however, was not yet done with Agassiz. Gray began with an anecdote.
He had learned that when speaking recently to members of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, Agassiz had also talked about the trees on the slopes of the White Mountains—how they start out as large, strapping specimens and shrink and dwindle the higher one gets until only puny shrubs are left at the summit. Agassiz supposes as his argument seems to require that the dwarf trees in question grow and survive near the top of the mountains, notwithstanding they are not the fittest, rather than because they are the fittest, for the conditions?
Nahant on Massachusetts Bay was a favorite spot for Louis Agassiz to study the natural history of marine organisms and to make observations about geology. Again he is with his favorite animals, the jellyfish of New England, but now he is outside, on the beach, in the ocean water, greedily reaching for them.
Skip to main content. Agassiz had never seen an Black person at home in Switzerland. During his stay in Philadelphia, he noticed that all the servants at his hotel were Black men. That winter, when Agassiz delivered his very first lecture in America, he hinted at his belief in polygenism: he suggested that Black people may have descended from different ancestors as white people.
As the months passed, he became less discreet. At an lecture at the Charleston Literary Club in South Carolina, he told a rapt crowd of naturalists that Black people were physiologically and anatomically distinct from white people.
In , after spending several winters in South Carolina, he decided to throw his full weight behind polygenism, defending the theory to the public in the Christian Examiner. To some Christians, the idea of polygenism was blasphemous — not because of its racist implications but because of its revisionist ones.
Agassiz maintained that Black people could not be descendants of Adam and Eve because the Bible only described one act of creation: that of white people.
In his essay for the Christian Examiner, Agassiz attempted to reconcile the two by arguing that all men, regardless of origin, were equal in the eyes of God, but emphasized that neither religious dogma nor politics was relevant to what he deemed a purely scientific inquiry. Yet, pages later, he prescribed his own plan: that men of different races occupy their distinct positions in society.
It was impossible to separate the racist science from its political environment. Though Agassiz considered himself an opponent of slavery, he maintained that there were profound differences between the races which made them unequal. One of the most vocal, a doctor by the name of Josiah C. It is hard to understand how Agassiz could have expected that his arguments could be used otherwise. One of his biographers, Edward Lurie, suggested in that as a foreigner, Agassiz could not understand the full significance of his actions but was nonetheless drawn to the flame of public attention.
To Agassiz, the natural world was a window into the mind of God. He was so focused on the philosophical and the divine that he often overlooked the material implications of his research.
But while his work on fish fossils and glaciers had few political stakes, his theory on the origins of men had countless ones. For Agassiz to argue that he was simply concerned with matters of science, he had to insist that he saw Black people strictly as specimens and nothing more — an inherently false position. In March of , Agassiz commissioned J. Zealy, a local daguerreotypist, to photograph seven enslaved people from plantations in Columbia, S.
He had just traveled to Charleston to attend a scientific meeting on the polygenism debate when he received an invitation to examine African-born enslaved people in Columbia.
Delighted, Agassiz cancelled several paid lectures to make the trip. He toured at least four plantations, inspecting the enslaved people present before selecting seven for study. Though the majority of the captives were born in African countries, Delia and Drana were born in the United States.
First, they were instructed to sit for traditional portraits. Then they were commanded to strip naked and stand before the camera, likely for long stretches at a time. Agassiz had requested photographs of their bodies from the front, side, and rear views. A religious believer in the power of observation, he hoped the collection of images would identify the unique phrenological and physiognomic features which distinguished the enslaved people as members of a separate species.
In the haunting images, the enslaved people look directly at the camera as they undress. Some, notably Delia, have tears in their eyes. Others stare straight ahead, seemingly unemotional or resigned. These are believed to be the earliest known photographs of enslaved peoples to date.
It is unclear what Agassiz intended to make of them. A newspaper report from the Boston Daily Evening Traveler indicates that soon after he received the photos, he put the daguerreotypes on display during a meeting of the Cambridge Scientific Club. As with most of his work, Agassiz found ways to relate his spirituality and religion to his work. This is the primary reason why Agassiz was so resistant to change.
Agassiz opposed the theories of both monogenism and evolution. According to him, the idea of evolution reduced the wisdom of God. All of his life, he saw the Earth as a great creation by God. As such, he never in his life embraced the work of Darwin, which had already become widely accepted in the scientific community. Of course, it is of great importance to note that Agassiz rejected racism and believed in human unity.
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