This View of Life 
Agassiz in the Galapagos 
Why did the last great 
scientist-creationist 
retrace Darwin’s footsteps? 
by Stephen Jay Gould 
I once had a gutsy English teacher 
who used a drugstore paperback called 
Word Power Made Easy instead of the 
insipid fare officially available. It con- 
tained some nifty words, and she would 
call upon us in turn for definitions. I will 
never forget the spectacle of five kids in 
a row denying that they knew what 
“nymphomania” meant — the single 
word, one may be confident, that every- 
one had learned with avidity. Sixth in 
line was the class innocent; she blushed 
and then gave a straightforward, accu- 
rate definition in her sweet, level voice. 
Bless her for all of us and our cowardly 
discomfort; I trust that all has gone well 
for her since last we met on graduation 
day. 
Nymphomania titillated me to my 
pubescent core, but two paired words 
from the same lesson — anachronism 
and incongruity — interested me more 
for the eerie feeling they inspired. Noth- 
ing elicits a greater mixture of fascina- 
tion and distress in me than objects or 
people that seem to be in the wrong time 
or place. The little things that offend a 
sense of order are the most disturbing. 
Thus, I was stunned in 1965 to discover 
that Alexander Kerensky, alive, well, 
and living as a Russian emigre in New 
York, had just written a book. Kerensky, 
the man who preceded the Bolsheviks in 
1917? Kerensky, so linked with Lenin 
and times long past in my thoughts, still 
among us? (He died, in fact, in 1970, at 
age 89.) 
Last month, on a ship headed for the 
Galapagos Islands, I encountered an in- 
congruity that struck me just as force- 
fully. I was listening to a lecture when a 
throwaway line cut right into me. “Louis 
Agassiz,” the man said, “visited the 
Galapagos and made scientific collec- 
tions there in 1872.” What? The primal 
creationist, the last great holdout 
against Darwin, in the Galapagos, the 
land that stands for evolution and 
prompted Darwin’s own conversion? 
One might as well let a Christian into 
Mecca. It seems as incongruous as a 
president of the United States portray- 
ing an inebriated pitcher in the 1926 
World Series. 
Louis Agassiz was, without doubt, the 
greatest and most influential naturalist 
of nineteenth-century America. A Swiss 
by birth, he was the first great European 
theorist in biology to make America his 
home. He had charm, wit, and connec- 
tions aplenty, and he took the Boston 
Brahmins by storm. He was an intimate 
of Emerson, Longfellow, and anyone 
who really mattered in America’s most 
patrician town. He published and raised 
money with equal zeal and virtually 
established natural history as a profes- 
sional discipline in America; indeed, I 
am writing this article in the great mu- 
seum that he built. 
But Agassiz’s summer of fame and 
fortune turned into a winter of doubt 
and befuddlement. He was Darwin’s 
contemporary (two years older), but his 
mind was indentured to the creationist 
world view and the idealist philosophy 
that he had learned from Europe’s great 
scientists. The erudition that had so 
charmed America’s rustics became his 
undoing; Agassiz could not adjust to 
Darwin’s world. All his students and 
colleagues became evolutionists. He 
fretted and struggled, for no one enjoys 
being an intellectual outcast. Agassiz 
died in 1873, sad and intellectually iso- 
lated but still arguing that the history of 
life reflects a preordained, divine plan 
and that species are the created incarna- 
tions of ideas in God’s mind. 
Agassiz did, however, visit the Gala- 
pagos a year before he died. My previ- 
ous ignorance of this incongruity is at 
least partly excusable, for he never 
breathed a word about it in any speech 
or publication. Why this silence, when 
his last year is full of documents and 
pronouncements? Why was he there? 
What impact did those finches and tor- 
toises have upon him? Did the land that 
so inspired Darwin, fueling his transition 
from prospective preacher to evolution- 
ary agnostic, do nothing for Agassiz? Is 
not this silence as curious as the basic 
fact of Agassiz’s visit? These questions 
bothered me throughout my stay in the 
Galapagos, but I could not learn the 
answers until I returned to the library 
that Agassiz himself had founded more 
than a century ago. 
Agassiz’s friend Benjamin Peirce had 
become Superintendent of the Coast 
Survey. In February of 1871, he wrote 
to Agassiz offering him the use of the 
Hassler, a steamer fit for deep-sea 
dredging. I suspect that Peirce had a 
strong ulterior motive beyond the desire 
to collect some deep-sea fishes: he hoped 
that Agassiz’s intellectual stagnation 
might be broken by a long voyage of 
direct exposure to nature. Agassiz had 
spent so much time raising money for 
his museum and politicking for natural 
history in America that his contact with 
organisms other than the human kind 
had virtually ceased. Agassiz’s life now 
belied his famous motto: study nature, 
not books. Perhaps he could be shaken 
into modernity by renewed contact with 
the original source of his fame. 
Agassiz understood only too well and 
readily accepted Peirce’s offer. Agas- 
siz’s friends rejoiced, for all were sad- 
dened by the intellectual hardening of 
such a great mind. Darwin himself 
wrote to Agassiz’s son: “Pray give my 
most sincere respects to your father. 
What a wonderful man he is to think of 
going round Cape Horn; if he does go, I 
wish he could go through the Strait of 
Magellan.” The Hassler left Boston in 
December 1871, moved down the east- 
ern coast of South America, fulfilled 
Darwin’s hope by sailing through the 
Strait of Magellan, passed up the west- 
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