Agassiz

b. Motieren-Vuly, Switzerland, 28 May 1807; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 14 December 1873.

Biographical Background

The son of a minister, Agassiz was educated in the universities of Heidelberg, Erlangen (from which he got his doctorate in 1829), and Munich (from which he got his medical doctoral degree in 1830). He studied with prominent German biologists, including Ignaz Döllinger (1770-1841) and Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), both architects of Naturphilosophie, a German Romantic philosophy that sought for metaphysical correspondences and interconnections within the world of living things. He received his medical degree from the University of Erlangen in 1830 and went on to Paris to study comparative anatomy under Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) with whom he worked from 1831 to 1832. After Cuvier's death, Agassiz took up a professorship at the Lyceum of Neuchatel in Switzerland from 1832 until 1846, where he worked on paleontology, systematics, and glaciology. Agassiz took up the study of glaciers in 1836 as something of a sideline, but his contributions made him known as the ‘Father of Glaciology’: he formulated what is known as the Theory of Ice Ages, according to which pre-historical glacial advances were due to world-wide climatic changes. In 1846, Agassiz immigrated into the United States and in 1847 he accepted a professorship at Harvard where he stayed until his death. He organized the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Harvard which opened in 1860. Became a founding member of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He was a foremost student of both fossil and recent fishes. He was also a skilful fundraiser, being able to get the financial backing of the King of Prusia while in Europe and from many American philanthropists while in America. He established strong friendships with influential intellectuals of his times, including Alexander von Humboldt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth. Among his students, there were several who at some point or another took up the study of hypogean fishes, including Alpheus Spring Packard and Frederick Ward Putnam.

Involvement in Hypogean Fish Research

During the 5 October 1847 meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Agassiz proposed a ‘Plan for an investigation of the embryology, anatomy and effect of light on the blind-fish of the Mammoth Cave, Amblyopsis spelaeus’ (Agassiz 1847, p. 180). There he suggested that by studying this fish ‘there was an opportunity to settle, by actual experiment, the extent of physical influences in causing organized beings to assume their peculiar and distinctive characteristics in relation to the media in which they live.’ Agassiz, the unrepentant creationist, was not thinking in terms of the environment influencing evolution, but rather the effects of the environment on development. He proposed to raise individuals of Amblyopsis spelaea under different light conditions (darkness, moderate, and intense light) and see if ‘there is an eye formed in the dark to ascertain when and how (the pigmentation) disappears, as it is entirely wanting in the full-grown individuals, and again notice the differences in this respect between specimens growing under the influence of light’ (Agassiz 1847, p. 180).

He never carried out those experiments, yet he kept insisting on the importance of A. spelaea in biological research: ‘You asked me to give my opinion, respecting the primitive state of the eyeless animals of the Mammoth Cave. This is one of the most important questions to settle in natural history, and I have several years ago, proposed a plan for its investigation which, if well conducted would lead to as important results, for it might settle, once for ever, the question, in what condition and where the animals now living on the earth, were first called into existence. But the investigation would involve such long and laborious researches, that I doubt it will ever be undertaken. (...) If physical circumstances ever modified organized beings, it should be easily ascertained here.’ Despite these difficulties he remained optimist: ‘Whoever would settle the question by direct experiment might be sure to earn the everlasting gratitude of men of science, and here is a great aim for the young American naturalist who would not shrink from the idea of devoting his life to the solution of one great question.’ (Agassiz 1851, p. 255). These words may not have fallen into a vacuum since several of his students showed a great deal of interest in cave fishes.

Despite his insight, there is no question that Agassiz maintained an anti-evolutionist view until the very end of his life. On the rudimentary organs, he wrote ‘The organ remains, not for the performance of a function, but with reference to a plan’ (Agassiz 1859, p. 11). He considered A. spelaea to be an ‘aberrant cyprinodont (...) created under the circumstances in which they now live’ (Agassiz 1851, p. 256). And he never changed his mind: ‘Have fishes descended from a primitive type? So far am I from thinking this possible, that I do not believe there is a single specimen of fossil or living fish, whether marine or fresh-water, that has not been created with reference to a special intention and a definite aim’ (Agassiz 1885, Vol. 1, pp. 392-393).

Despite his intellectual prestige, Agassiz was viewed as an anachronism by many of his students when it came to issues of evolution and his rabid (and public) anti-Darwinian postures were soon ignored.