HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT, FEBRUARY 2013The paleontologist and zoologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) is sometimes blamed for having delayed the acceptance of Darwinism in American scientific circles by at least a decade. His stubborn racism, which he shared with many of his contemporaries but expressed more publicly than most, has further tarnished his image. In his own time, however, his popularity transcended class as well as regional boundaries. He was a cultural and scientific icon.
In my new book, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, I explore the complicated legacy of America’s first superstar scientist and collector par excellence.
In the words of one of Agassiz’s admirers, American literary critic Edwin Percy Whipple, no strange living thing was caught in wood or river, no mysterious rock unearthed “that was not sent to him as the one man in the country that could explain it.” Visitors to Agassiz’s house could testify to the ubiquity of such weird stuff. Turtles, for example, were everywhere: drifting glassy-eyed in jars; piled up, as dried specimens, on the shelves; or, if still alive, hiding under the stairs and floating in the bathtubs. And yet there was always room for more.
When the word was out ...
