science may anticipate the discovery of 
facts. If there is, as I believe to be the case, 
a plan according to which the affinities 
among animals and the order of their suc- 
cession in time were determined from the 
beginning ... if this world of ours is the 
work of intelligence, and not merely the 
product of force and matter, the human 
mind, as a part of the whole, should so 
chime with it, that, from what is known, it 
may reach the unknown. 
But Agassiz did not sail only to test 
evolution in the abstract. He chose his 
route as a challenge to Darwin, for he 
virtually retraced — and by conscious 
choice — the primary part of the Bea- 
gles itinerary. The Galapagos were not 
a convenient way station but a central 
part of the plot. His later silence be- 
comes more curious. 
The Beagle did circumnavigate the 
globe, but Darwin’s voyage was basi- 
cally a surveying expedition of the 
South American coast. Agassiz’s route 
therefore retraced the essence of Dar- 
win’s pathway — physically if not intel- 
lectually. One cannot read Elizabeth 
Agassiz’s account of the Hassler expedi- 
tion (published in her official biography 
of her husband) without recognizing the 
uncanny (and obviously not accidental) 
similarity with Darwin’s famous ac- 
count of the Beagle ' s voyage. (Elizabeth 
accompanied Louis on the trip.) Darwin 
concentrated primarily upon geology 
and so did Agassiz. The trip may have 
been advertised as a dredging expedi- 
tion, but Agassiz was most interested in 
reaching southern South America to 
test his theory of a global ice age. He 
had studied glacial striations and mo- 
raines in the Northern Hemisphere and 
had determined that a great ice sheet 
has descended from the north. (Stri- 
ations are scratches on bedrock made by 
pebbles frozen into the bases of glaciers. 
Moraines are hills of debris pushed by 
flowing ice to the fronts and sides of 
glaciers.) If the ice age had been global, 
striations and moraines in South Amer- 
ica would indicate a spread from Ant- 
arctica at the same time. Agassiz’s pre- 
dictions were, in this case, upheld — and 
he exulted in copious print (faithfully 
transcribed by Elizabeth and published 
in the Atlantic Monthly). 
Darwin was appalled by the rude life 
and appearance of the “savage” Fue- 
gians and so was Agassiz. Elizabeth 
recorded their joint impressions: “Noth- 
ing could be more coarse and repulsive 
than their appearance, in which the bru- 
tality of the savage was in no way re- 
deemed by physical strength or manli- 
ness. . . . They scrambled and snatched 
fiercely, like wild animals, for whatever 
they could catch.” 
If there be any lingering doubt about 
Agassiz’s conscious decision to evaluate 
Darwin by retracing his experiences, 
consider this passage, written at sea to 
his German colleague Carl Gegenbaur: 
I have sailed across the Atlantic Ocean 
through the Strait of Magellan, and along 
the western coast of South America to the 
northern latitudes. Marine animals were, 
naturally, my primary concern, but I also 
had a special purpose. I wanted to study the 
entire Darwinian theory, free from all exter- 
nal influences and former surroundings. 
Was it not on a similar voyage that Darwin 
developed his present opinions! I took few 
books with me . . . primarily Darwin’s major 
works. 
I can find few details about Agassiz’s 
stay in the Galapagos. We know that he 
arrived on June 10, 1872, spent a week 
or more, and visited five islands, one 
more than Darwin did. Elizabeth claims 
that Louis “enjoyed extremely his cruise 
among these islands of such rare geo- 
logical and zoological interest.” We 
know that he collected (or rather sat on 
the rocks while his assistants gathered) 
the famous iguanas that go swimming in 
the ocean to eat marine algae (some of 
his specimens are still in glass jars in our 
museum). We know that he crossed and 
greatly admired the bare fields of re- 
cently cooled ropy lava “full of the most 
singular and fantastic details.” I walked 
across a similar field, which Agassiz 
could not have seen since it formed 
during the 1 890s. I was mesmerized by 
the frozen signs of former activity — the 
undulating, ropy patterns of flow, the 
burst bubbles, and lengthy cracks of 
contraction. And I saw Pele’s tears, the 
most beautiful geological object, at 
small scale, that I have ever witnessed. 
When highly liquid lava is ejected from 
small vents, it may emerge as droplets of 
basalt that build drip castles of irides- 
cent stone about their outlet — tears 
from Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of vol- 
canoes (not from Martinique’s Mount 
Pelee, which has an extra e). 
Thus, I return to my original inquiry: 
if Agassiz went to the Galapagos as a 
central part of his plan to evaluate evo- 
lution by putting himself in Darwin’s 
shoes, what effect did Darwin’s most 
important spot have upon him? In re- 
sponse to this question we have only 
Agassiz’s public silence (and one private 
communication, to which I will shortly 
return). 
Two nonintellectual reasons may 
partly explain Agassiz’s uncharacteris- 
tic reticence. First, despite his produc- 
tive observations on South American 
glaciers, the Hassler expedition was ba- 
sically a failure and a profound disap- 
pointment — and Agassiz may have cho- 
sen largely to forget about it. The dredg- 
ing equipment never worked properly, 
and Agassiz recovered no specimens 
from the deepest oceans. The crew tried 
its best, but the ship was a misery. Jules 
Marcou, Agassiz’s faithful biographer, 
wrote: “It was a great, almost a cruel, 
carelessness to embark a man so distin- 
guished, so old [Agassiz was 64; perhaps 
concepts of age have changed], and so 
much an invalid as Agassiz was, in an 
unseaworthy craft, sailing under the 
United States flag.” 
Secondly, Agassiz was ill during 
much of the voyage, and his listlessness 
and discomfort increased as he left his 
beloved southern glaciers and moved 
into the sultry tropics. (The Galapagos, 
however, despite their equatorial loca- 
tion, lie in the path of a cool oceanic 
current and are generally temperate; the 
northernmost species of penguin inhab- 
its its shores.) Shortly after his return to 
Harvard, Agassiz wrote to Pedro II, 
emperor of Brazil (and an old buddy 
from a previous voyage): 
When I traversed the Strait of Magellan . . . 
work again became easy for me. The beauty 
of its sites, the resemblance of the moun- 
tains to those of Switzerland, the interest 
that the glaciers awakened in me, the happi- 
ness in seeing my predictions affirmed be- 
yond all my hopes — all these conspired to 
set me on the right course again, even to 
rejuvenate me. . . . Afterwards, I gradually 
declined as we advanced towards the tropi- 
cal regions; the heat exhausted me greatly, 
and during the month that we spent in 
Panama I was quite incapable of the least 
effort. 
(For all citations from letters, I have 
relied upon the originals in Harvard’s 
Houghton Library; none have been pub- 
lished in full before, although several 
have been excerpted in print. Agassiz 
wrote with equal facility in French [to 
Pedro II], German [to Gegenbaur], and 
English [to Peirce], and I have supplied 
the translations. I thank my secretary 
Agnes Pilot for transcribing the Gegen- 
baur letter into sensible Roman. Agassiz 
wrote it in the old German script that is 
all squiggles to me.) 
So far as I can tell, Agassiz’s only 
statement about the Galapagos occurs 
in a private letter to Benjamin Peirce, 
composed at sea on July 29, 1872, the 
day after he had written to Gegenbaur 
(and said nothing about the Galapagos). 
The letter begins with the lament of all 
landlubbers: “I fancy this note may 
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