xxii EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 



identified him with both past and present, and made him at once 

 so perplexing and so admired an intellect to men like Darwin and 

 Lyell. The only valid complaint such colleagues could make of Agas- 

 siz was that he had become a victim of the concepts and heroes of 

 his youth. On this fact rests one of the primary reasons why the 

 Essay on Classification is such a notable document in the history of 

 ideas. It charts the course of scientific and philosophic education 

 within a tradition that gave singular emphasis to man's special con- 

 ception of the cosmos ■ — ■ that of the supremacy of immaterial pur- 

 pose in the universe. At the same time it demonstrates the intellectual 

 power derived from the exact investigation of natural facts. As a re- 

 sult, Agassiz is able to offer some highly pertinent and modern ap- 

 praisals of problems in zoology, as well as to point up deficiencies 

 in the idea of development. Finally, the Essay shows how the meta- 

 physical interpretation of the facts can lead only to idealistic con- 

 clusions for an Agassiz, whereas the same facts meant something en- 

 tirely different to a man of Darwin's outlook. 



In the 1840's most professional naturalists were opposed to the 

 concept of development. This was true not only of Agassiz, but also 

 of such future Darwinians as Thomas Henry Huxley and Agassiz's 

 Harvard colleague, the botanist Asa Gray. Gray had applauded the 

 refutation of materialism continued in Agassiz's first Boston lectures 

 of 1846-47, in which the Swiss naturalist had ridiculed the notions 

 of unity and common serial development in the animal kingdom 

 advanced by the then unknown Robert Chambers in Vestiges of the 

 Natural History of Creation (1844). This was an easy task because 

 such arguments were highly speculative, being unsupported by much 

 direct evidence. In the Essay, similarly, it took little effort for Agassiz 

 to refute the assertions of crude environmentalists like Lamarck. He 

 merely marshaled the preponderance of known facts against vague 

 assertions of physical unity in animals and of the inheritance of 

 acquired characteristics. It was a primary characteristic of the intel- 

 lectual divergence between advocates of special creationism like 

 Cuvier and Agassiz and proponents of the developmental hypothesis 

 such as Chambers, Lamarck, or fitienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, that 

 upholders of classical biology were far superior in their actual ex- 

 perience of nature and their command of specialized subjects. 



In contrast to the earlier period, the decade of the 1850's, when 



