The Nineteenth Century 237 



(shrimp, squid, and fish) as " adaptations to the darkness of great 

 depths," left " no possibility of referring them to sudden mutations 

 which have arisen all at once in these groups with no relation to 

 utility, and yet have not occurred in any animals living in the light. 

 Only ' variations ' progiessing and combining in the direction of 

 utility can give us the key to an explanation of the origin of such 

 structure." ^^ These quotations are of historic interest as a sample 

 of the reasoning current during and after the great debate on 

 evolution. 



the popularization of science 



During the seventies, eighties, and nineties in the United States 

 and in other countries, science became popularized to an extra- 

 ordinary ^^ degree. The trend affected both the exact sciences and 

 the natural sciences. The latter owe a particular debt to Darwin 

 and other writers on evolution and to the public lectures of Louis 

 Agassiz (1807-1873). 



Agassiz's own contributions *° to luminescence were small. He 

 merely mentioned that many transparent forms like medusae and 

 also the sea kidney, Renilla, were luminous, in lectures delivered 

 before the Lowell Institute,*^ in December and January, 1848-1849. 

 Nevertheless, he created a demand in the United States for popular 

 zoological information. Series of books appeared dealing not only 

 with every phase of natural history, but with science in general.^" 



One of the examples of popular writing is Les Phenomenes de la 

 Physique (Paris, 1868), by Amedee Victor Guillemin (1826-1893), 

 a French mathematician, whose profusely illustrated works on the 

 sun, comets, and the heavens were highly regarded at the time. His 

 work on Physique (translated by Mrs. Norman Lockyer as The 

 Forces of Nature, 1873) contained a six-page section on " Phospho- 

 rescence," treating of animal and vegetable light, phosphors, etc. 



^^ From the J. A. Thomson translation of Weismann, The evolution theory 2' 322 

 London, 1904. 



^* Popular science writing actually started before the 1870's. A good example is 

 The poetry of science, by Robert Hunt, first American from the second English edi- 

 tion, Boston, 1850. The book contains many quaint interpretations of luminescence. 



^^The son, Alexander Agassiz (1835-1910), first noted that ctenophore embryos 

 were luminous in 1874 {Mem. Amer. Acad. Arts and Sci. 10 (2) , Supp.: 357-398) . 



*^ Published as Twelve lectures on comparative embryology delivered before the 

 Lowell Institute in Boston, New York, 1849. This was the first " phonographic report " 

 (shorthand) ever made and printed. There is nothing on luminescence in Agassiz 

 and Gould's Principles of zoology, Boston, 1854, nor in Agassiz's Methods of study of 

 natural history, Boston, 1863. 



^^'The International Scientific Series (New York) and the Modern Science Series 

 (London) , edited by Sir John Lubbock, are examples. One of this series was The 

 fauna of the deep sea by S. J. Hickson (1893) containing a chapter dealing with the 

 characteristics, including luminescence, of deep sea forms. 



