HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT, FEBRUARY 2013Louis Agassiz’s world, in which each living thing occupies its assigned place in a taxonomic system and each scale tells us all we need to know about the fish to which it belongs, may seem static to some, frozen in predictability. But as we have seen in the last two chapters, e pur si muove: it moves nevertheless. In his mind, glaciers shifted and descended, fossils floated, jellyfish undulated, and fish frolicked in rivers too deep ever to be exhausted by fishermen. If rocks defined one pole of his imagination, water was the other one. Louis Agassiz was a marine biologist long before he had beheld an ocean.
And now, for the first time, settling down in his house on Webster Street in East Boston in the spring of 1847, he was living next to one. Agassiz was barely able to contain his excitement over being able to see, for the first time and in the flesh, some of the creatures he had studied for so long only as fossils or preserved under glass in a museum. The sea and its manifold inhabitants held powerful sway over his imagination, as they did over many of his Victorian contemporaries. Now that the surface of the earth had been mostly mapped and the animals inhabiting it had been described and classified, exploring the depths of the sea became the next great challenge. Fueled by accessibly ...
