X EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 



r ♦?* greatest confidence," Agassiz published a separate edition of the 

 Essay in London. The volume appeared just a few months before 

 the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Those natu- 

 ralists who had urged Agassiz to bring his book before the English 

 public — Sir Richard Owen, William Buckland, and Adam Sedg- 

 wick — found Darwin's ideas intolerable. The Essay and the Origin 

 represented two entirely opposed interpretations of nature, and no 

 sharper contrast between the assumptions of special creationism and 

 the concept of the evolution of species ever appeared than in the 

 language of these two volumes. It is instructive to compare this 

 language. Agassiz is always affirmative and assertive, his words carry- 

 ing the certainty of tradition, the confidence of established truth, 

 and the forcefulness of belief provided by a concept of ultimate 

 causation. These tones are in sharp contrast to the patient, humble 

 manner in which Darwin, asking for provisional intellectual accept- 

 ance, piled fact upon fact. Having staked so much on the Essay, 

 Agassiz could never understand why Darwin's work was accorded 

 such a reception; he thought he had demolished all such notions 

 of "development" in the Essay, and not until 1873, the year of his 

 death, could he bring himself to a reluctant admission that Darwin's 

 method and proofs differed from those of earlier advocates of evolu- 

 tion. If for no other reason, the Essay is remarkable in that two years 

 before Darwin published, Agassiz took up and answered to his satis- 

 faction the great majority of the problems which had led Darwin 

 to the study of the idea of evolution. 



Born in Motiers, Switzerland, in 1807, Agassiz determined at an 

 early age to become "the first naturalist of his time." Pursuing this 

 aim with energy and ambition that never yielded to circumstance, 

 he gained an education in natural history at the universities of 

 Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich. At Munich Agassiz came under 

 the influence of the embryologist Ignatius Dollinger, the zoologist 

 Lorenz Oken, and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, all of whom 

 did much to shape his thinking about the techniques and import of 

 the study of natural history. His intellectual life in fact always re- 

 flected two important results of his German experience — dedication 

 to exact research and a view of nature as illustrative of cosmic pur- 

 pose. From Munich Agassiz journeyed to Paris, where he spent a 



