Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes by Stephen Jay Gould
Cuvier’s methodology may have been naïve, but one can only admire his trust in nature and his zeal for building a world by direct and patient observation, rather than by fiat or unconstrained feats of imagination. His rejection of received doctrine as a source of necessary truth is, perhaps, most apparent in the very section of the Discours préliminaire that might seem, superficially, to tout the Bible as infallible—his defense of Noah’s flood. He does argue for a worldwide flood some five thousand years ago, and he does cite the Bible as support. But his thirty-page discussion is a literary and ethnographic compendium of all traditions, from Chaldean to Chinese. And we soon realize that Cuvier has subtly reversed the usual apologetic tradition. He does not invoke geology and non-Christian thought as window dressing for “how do I know, the Bible tells me so.” Rather, he uses the Bible as a single source among many of equal merit as he searches for clues to unravel the earth’s history. Noah’s tale is but one local and highly imperfect rendering of the last major paroxysm.
As a rough rule of thumb, I always look to closing paragraphs as indications of a book’s essential character. General treatises in the pontifical mode proclaim a union of all knowledge, or tell us, in no uncertain terms, what it all means for man’s physical future and moral development. Cuvier’s conclusion is revealing in its starkly contrasting style. No drum rolls, no statements about the implications of catastrophism for human history. Cuvier simply presents a ten-page list of outstanding problems in stratigraphic geology. “It appears to me,” he writes, “that a consecutive history of such singular deposits would be infinitely more valuable than so many contradictory conjectures respecting the first origin of the world and other planets.” He ranges across Europe, up and down the geological column, offering suggestions for empirical work: study recent alluvial deposits of the Po and the Arno, dig in the gypsum quarries of Aix and Paris, collect “gryphites, the cornua ammonis and the entrochi” that may abound in the Black Forest. “We are as yet uninformed of the real position of the stinkstone slate of Oeningen, which is also said to be full of the remains of fresh-water fish.”
A man who could end one of the greatest theoretical treatises in natural history with a plea for unraveling the stratigraphic position and faunal content of the Oeningen stinkstones knew, in the most profound way, what science is about. We may wallow forever in the thinkable; science traffics in the doable.
8 | Agassiz in the Galápagos
I ONCE HAD a gutsy English teacher who used a drugstore paperback called Word Power Made Easy instead of the insipid fare officially available. It contained some nifty words, and she would call upon us in turn for definitions. I will never forget the spectacle of five kids in a row denying that they knew what “nymphomania” meant—the single word, one may be confident, that everyone had learned with avidity. Sixth in line was the class innocent; she blushed and then gave a straightforward, accurate definition in her sweet, level voice. Bless her for all of us and our cowardly discomfort; I trust that all has gone well for her since last we met on graduation day.
Nymphomania titillated me to my pubescent core, but two paired words from the same lesson—anachronism and incongruity—interested me more for the eerie feeling they inspired. Nothing elicits a greater mixture of fascination and distress in me than objects or people that seem to be in the wrong time or place. The little things that offend a sense of order are the most disturbing. Thus, I was stunned in 1965 to discover that Alexander Kerensky was alive, well, and living as a Russian émigré in New York. Kerensky, the man who preceded the Bolsheviks in 1917? Kerensky, so linked with Lenin and times long past in my thoughts, still among us? (He died, in fact, in 1970, at age 89.)
In July 1981, on a ship headed for the Galápagos Islands, I encountered an incongruity that struck me just as forcefully. I was listening to a lecture when a throwaway line cut right into me. “Louis Agassiz,” the man said, “visited the Galápagos and made scientific collections there in 1872.” What? The primal creationist, the last great holdout against Darwin, in the Galápagos, the land that stands for evolution and prompted Darwin’s own conversion? One might as well let a Christian into Mecca. It seems as incongruous as a president of the United States portraying an inebriated pitcher in the 1926 World Series.
Louis Agassiz was, without doubt, the greatest and most influential naturalist of nineteenth-century America. A Swiss by birth, he was the first great European theorist in biology to make America his home. He had charm, wit, and connections aplenty, and he took the Boston Brahmins by storm. He was an intimate of Emerson, Longfellow, and anyone who really mattered in America’s most patrician town. He published and raised money with equal zeal and virtually established natural history as a professional discipline in America; indeed, I am writing this article in the great museum that he built.
But Agassiz’s summer of fame and fortune turned into a winter of doubt and befuddlement. He was Darwin’s contemporary (two years older), but his mind was indentured to the creationist world view and the idealist philosophy that he had learned from Europe’s great scientists. The erudition that had so charmed America’s rustics became his undoing; Agassiz could not adjust to Darwin’s world. All his students and colleagues became evolutionists. He fretted and struggled, for no one enjoys being an intellectual outcast. Agassiz died in 1873, sad and intellectually isolated but still arguing that the history of life reflects a preordained, divine plan and that species are the created incarnations of ideas in God’s mind.
Agassiz did, however, visit the Galápagos a year before he died. My previous ignorance of this incongruity is at least partly excusable, for he never breathed a word about it in any speech or publication. Why this silence, when his last year is full of documents and pronouncements? Why was he there? What impact did those finches and tortoises have upon him? Did the land that so inspired Darwin, fueling his transition from prospective preacher to evolutionary agnostic, do nothing for Agassiz? Is not this silence as curious as the basic fact of Agassiz’s visit? These questions bothered me throughout my stay in the Galápagos, but I could not learn the answers until I returned to the library that Agassiz himself had founded more than a century ago.
Agassiz’s friend Benjamin Peirce had become superintendent of the Coast Survey. In February of 1871, he wrote to Agassiz offering him the use of the Hassler, a steamer fit for deep-sea dredging. I suspect that Peirce had a strong ulterior motive beyond the desire to collect some deep-sea fishes: he hoped that Agassiz’s intellectual stagnation might be broken by a long voyage of direct exposure to nature. Agassiz had spent so much time raising money for his museum and politicking for natural history in America that his contact with organisms other than the human kind had virtually ceased. Agassiz’s life now belied his famous motto: study nature, not books. Perhaps he could be shaken into modernity by renewed contact with the original source of his fame.
Agassiz understood only too well and readily accepted Peirce’s offer. Agassiz’s friends rejoiced, for all were saddened by the intellectual hardening of such a great mind. Darwin himself wrote to Agassiz’s son: “Pray give my most sincere respects to your father. What a wonderful man he is to think of going round Cape Horn; if he does go, I wish he could go through the Strait of Magellan.” The Hassler left Boston in December 1871, moved down the eastern coast of South America, fulfilled Darwin’s hope by sailing through the Strait of Magellan, passed up the western coast of South America, reached the Galápagos (at the equator, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador) on June 10, 1872, and finally docked at San Francisco on August 24.
A possible solution to the enigma of Agassiz’s silence immediately suggests itself. The Galápagos are pretty much “on the way” along Agassiz’s route. Perhaps the Hassler only stopped for provisions—just passing by. Perhaps the cruise was so devoted to deep-sea dredging and Agassiz’s observations of glaciers in the southern Andes that the Galápagos provided no special interest or concern.
Agassiz, left, and his friend Benjamin Peirce, who arran
This easy explanation is clearly incorrect. In fact, Agassiz planned the Hassler voyage as a test of evolutionary theory. The dredging itself was not designed merely to collect unknown creatures but to gather evidence that Agassiz hoped would establish the continuing intellectual validity of his lingering creationism. In a remarkable letter to Peirce, written just two days before the Hassler set sail, Agassiz stated exactly what he expected to find in the deep dredges.
Agassiz believed that God had ordained a plan for the history of life and then proceeded to create species in the appropriate sequence throughout geological time. God matched environments to the preconceived plan of creation. The fit of life to environment does not record the evolutionary tracking of changing climates by organisms, but rather the construction of environments by God to fit the preconceived plan of creation: “the animal world designed from the beginning has been the motive for the physical changes which our globe has undergone,” Agassiz wrote to Peirce. He then applied this curiously inverted argument to the belief, then widespread but now disproved, that the deep oceans formed a domain devoid of change or challenge—a cold, calm, and constant world. God could only have made such an environment for the most primitive creatures of any group. The deep oceans would therefore harbor living representatives of the simple organisms found as fossils in ancient rocks. Since evolution demands progressive change through time, the persistence of these simple and early forms will demonstrate the bankruptcy of Darwinian theory. (I don’t think Agassiz ever understood that the principle of natural selection does not predict global and inexorable progress but only adaptation to local environments. The persistence of simple forms in a constant deep sea would have satisfied Darwin’s evolutionary theory as well as Agassiz’s God. But the depths are not constant, and their life is not primitive.)
The letter to Peirce displays that mixture of psychological distress and intellectual pugnacity so characteristic of Agassiz’s opposition to evolution in his later years. He knows that the world will scoff at his preconceptions, but he will pursue them to the point of specific predictions nonetheless—the discovery of “ancient” organisms alive in the deep sea:
I am desirous to leave in your hands a document which may be very compromising for me, but which I nevertheless am determined to write in the hope of showing within what limits natural history has advanced toward that point of maturity when science may anticipate the discovery of facts. If there is, as I believe to be the case, a plan according to which the affinities among animals and the order of their succession in time were determined from the beginning…if this world of ours is the work of intelligence, and not merely the product of force and matter, the human mind, as a part of the whole, should so chime with it, that, from what is known, it may reach the unknown.
But Agassiz did not sail only to test evolution in the abstract. He chose his route as a challenge to Darwin, for he virtually retraced—and by conscious choice—the primary part of the Beagle’s itinerary. The Galápagos were not a convenient way station but a central part of the plot. His later silence becomes more curious.
The Beagle did circumnavigate the globe, but Darwin’s voyage was basically a surveying expedition of the South American coast. Agassiz’s route therefore retraced the essence of Darwin’s pathway—physically if not intellectually. One cannot read Elizabeth Agassiz’s account of the Hassler expedition without recognizing the uncanny (and obviously not accidental) similarity with Darwin’s famous account of the Beagle’s voyage. (Elizabeth accompanied Louis on the trip.) Darwin concentrated primarily upon geology and so did Agassiz. The trip may have been advertised as a dredging expedition, but Agassiz was most interested in reaching southern South America to test his theory of a global ice age. He had studied glacial striations and moraines in the Northern Hemisphere and had determined that a great ice sheet had once descended from the north. (Striations are scratches on bedrock made by pebbles frozen into the bases of glaciers. Moraines are hills of debris pushed by flowing ice to the fronts and sides of glaciers.) If the ice age had been global, striations and moraines in South America would indicate a spread from Antarctica at the same time. Agassiz’s predictions were, in this case, upheld—and he exulted in copious print (faithfully transcribed by Elizabeth and published in the Atlantic Monthly).
Darwin was appalled by the rude life and appearance of the “savage” Fuegians and so was Agassiz. Elizabeth recorded their joint impressions: “Nothing could be more coarse and repulsive than their appearance, in which the brutality of the savage was in no way redeemed by physical strength or manliness…. They scrambled and snatched fiercely, like wild animals, for whatever they could catch.”
If there be any lingering doubt about Agassiz’s conscious decision to evaluate Darwin by retracing his experiences, consider this passage, written at sea to his German colleague Carl Gegenbaur:
I have sailed across the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Magellan, and along the western coast of South America to the northern latitudes. Marine animals were, naturally, my primary concern, but I also had a special purpose. I wanted to study the entire Darwinian theory, free from all external influences and former surroundings. Was it not on a similar voyage that Darwin developed his present opinions! I took few books with me…primarily Darwin’s major works.
I can find few details about Agassiz’s stay in the Galápagos. We know that he arrived on June 10, 1872, spent a week or more, and visited five islands, one more than Darwin did. Elizabeth claims that Louis “enjoyed extremely his cruise among these islands of such rare geological and zoological interest.” We know that he collected (or rather sat on the rocks while his assistants gathered) the famous iguanas that go swimming in the ocean to eat marine algae (some of his specimens are still in glass jars in our museum). We know that he crossed and greatly admired the bare fields of recently cooled ropy lava “full of the most singular and fantastic details.” I walked across a similar field, one that Agassiz could not have seen since it formed during the 1890s. I was mesmerized by the frozen signs of former activity—the undulating, ropy patterns of flow, the burst bubbles, and lengthy cracks of contraction. And I saw Pele’s tears, the most beautiful geological object, at small scale, that I have ever witnessed. When highly liquid lava is ejected from small vents, it may emerge as droplets of basalt that build drip castles of iridescent stone about their outlet—tears from Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes (not from Martinique’s Mount Pelée, which has an extra e).
Thus, I return to my original inquiry: if Agassiz went to the Galápagos as a central part of his plan to evaluate evolution by putting himself in Darwin’s shoes, what effect did Darwin’s most important spot have upon him? In response to this question we have only Agassiz’s public silence (and one private communication, to which I will shortly return).
Two nonintellectual reasons may partly explain Agassiz’s uncharacteristic reticence. First, despite his productive observations on South American glaciers, the Hassler expedition was basically a failure and a profound disappointment—and Agassiz may have chosen largely to forget about it. The dredging equipment never worked properly, and Agassiz recovered no specimens from the deepest oceans. The crew tried its best, but the ship was a misery. Jules Marcou, Agassiz’s faithful biographer, wrote: “It was a great, almost a cruel, carelessness to embark a man so distinguished, so old [Agassiz was 64; perhaps concepts of age have changed], and so much an invalid as Agassiz was, in an unseaworthy craft, sailing under the United States flag.”
Secondly, Agassiz was ill during much of the voyage, and his listlessness and discomfort increased as he left his beloved southern glaciers and moved into the sultry tropics. (The Galápagos, however, despite their equatorial location, lie in the path of a cool oceanic current and are generally temperate; the northernmost species of penguin inhabits its shores.) Shortly after his return to Harvard, Agassiz wrote to Pedro II, emperor of Brazil (and an old buddy fro
When I traversed the Strait of Magellan…work again became easy for me. The beauty of its sites, the resemblance of the mountains to those of Switzerland, the interest that the glaciers awakened in me, the happiness in seeing my predictions affirmed beyond all my hopes—all these conspired to set me on the right course again, even to rejuvenate me…. Afterwards, I gradually declined as we advanced towards the tropical regions; the heat exhausted me greatly, and during the month that we spent in Panama I was quite incapable of the least effort.
(For all citations from letters, I have relied upon the originals in Harvard’s Houghton Library; none has been published in full before, although several have been excerpted in print. Agassiz wrote with equal facility in French [to Pedro II], German [to Gegenbaur], and English [to Peirce], and I have supplied the translations. I thank my secretary Agnes Pilot for transcribing the Gegenbaur letter into sensible Roman. Agassiz, wrote it in the old German script that is all squiggles to me.)
So far as I can tell, Agassiz’s only statement about the Galápagos occurs in a private letter to Benjamin Peirce, composed at sea on July 29, 1872, the day after he had written to Gegenbaur (and said nothing about the Galápagos). The letter begins with the lament of all landlubbers: “I fancy this note may reach you in Martha’s Vineyard, and I heartily wish I could be there with you, and take some rest from this everlasting rocking.” Agassiz continues with his only statement:
Our visit to the Galapagos has been full of geological and zoological interest. It is most impressive to see an extensive archipelago, of most recent origin, inhabited by creatures so different from any known in other parts of the world. Here we have a positive limit to the length of time that may have been granted for the transformation of these animals, if indeed they are in any way derived from others dwelling in different parts of the world. The Galapagos are so recent that some of the islands are barely covered with the most scanty vegetation, itself peculiar to these islands. Some parts of their surface are entirely bare, and a great many of the craters and lava streams are so fresh, that the atmospheric agents have not yet made an impression on them. Their age does not, therefore, go back to earlier geological periods; they belong to our times, geologically speaking; Whence, then, do their inhabitants (animals as well as plants) come? If descended from some other type, belonging to any neighboring land, then it does not require such unspeakably long periods for the transformation of species as the modern advocates of transmutation claim; and the mystery of change, with such marked and characteristic differences between existing species, is only increased, and brought to level with that of creation. If they are autochthones, from what germs did they start into existence? I think that careful observers, in view of these facts, will have to acknowledge that our science is not yet ripe for a fair discussion of the origin of organized beings.