Sublime

I have not as yet mentioned a circumstance which influenced my whole career more than any other. This was my friendship with Professor Henslow. Before coming up to Cambridge, I had heard of him from my brother as a man who knew every branch of science, and I was accordingly prepared to reverence him. He kept open house once every week when all unde

And although he specifically denied any hierarchical intent, Hunter’s imagery inspired the obstetrician Charles White (1728–1813) to think about race as physical appearance.

In 1869, in Boston, on the 100th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, Agassiz, by then America’s most renowned naturalist, would recount in a long speech the incredible life of his mentor, the monumental productivity right up until the end, the trip to the Urals in 1829, the historic series of lectures in Berlin, the friendship with Goethe, the new car

He for his own part knew that if his personal prospects simply had been concerned, he would not have cared a rotten nut for the banker’s friendship or enmity. What he really cared for was a medium for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all, was he not bound to prefer the object of getting a good hospital, where he could demonstrate the sp

Agassiz produced a stream of articles for Atlantic Monthly and carried the fight to the lecture circuit, his popularity soaring to new heights. The articles, published as a book, Methods of Study in Natural History, went through nineteen editions. To know that Agassiz of Harvard decried the theories of Charles Darwin, that he, of all learned men, m

special evolution entirely inoffensive. One of Darwin’s earliest and most vigorous champions, the extremely accomplished American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), was a devout Christian who saw such evolution as a manifestation of God’s creative power in the fabric of nature.

Agassiz’s son, Alexander, who was trained by his father and served as his principal museum assistant, became a leading zoologist, a pioneer in oceanography, and made a fortune in copper mining, much of which he ultimately devoted to the museum and other work begun by his father. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, in less than a decade after her husband’s deat