The mismeasure of man Revised and Expanded. Graves, Joseph Graves Jr, J. The emperor's new clothes: Biological theories of race at the millennium. Rutgers University Press. Hartocollis, A. The Descendants, not Harvard, a Lawsuit Says.
Irmscher, C. Louis Agassiz: creator of American science. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Isselbacher, J. Machado, M. Miles, T. Sinha, M. Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Nott, J. Agassiz; W. And when his scientific ventures inevitably demanded more money than they had on hand, she gladly cut corners at home, serving as his personal secretary and asking her relatives for loans.
To help keep their family out of poverty, she even opened a private school for girls in their home which inspired the precursor to Radcliffe College, the Harvard Annex.
In the process she gained her own scientific expertise. Her detailed accounts of their trips played a vital role in his publications and towards the end of his life, they often co-wrote their scientific monographs. Despite this, Cary continuously downplayed her own skills and contributions to science. In his very first year in Boston, Agassiz met someone else who would transform the trajectory of his career: a sickly physician named Samuel G.
By , Morton had acquired over human skulls — many as gifts mailed to his doorstep. In the decade to come, he sought to prove that these differences were constant and innate — to prove, against both scientific consensus and biblical doctrine, that men of different races belonged to different species. Soon after arriving in Boston, Agassiz set out on a professional tour of the Northeast. He ended up spending the majority of it in Philadelphia, keeping the company of one man: Morton.
He was hooked. He implied that he embraced polygenism for its scientific rigor. But the letter reveals he had another reason to support Morton, one that was less logical, less objective.
Agassiz had never seen an Black person at home in Switzerland. During his stay in Philadelphia, he noticed that all the servants at his hotel were Black men. That winter, when Agassiz delivered his very first lecture in America, he hinted at his belief in polygenism: he suggested that Black people may have descended from different ancestors as white people.
As the months passed, he became less discreet. At an lecture at the Charleston Literary Club in South Carolina, he told a rapt crowd of naturalists that Black people were physiologically and anatomically distinct from white people.
In , after spending several winters in South Carolina, he decided to throw his full weight behind polygenism, defending the theory to the public in the Christian Examiner. To some Christians, the idea of polygenism was blasphemous — not because of its racist implications but because of its revisionist ones. Agassiz maintained that Black people could not be descendants of Adam and Eve because the Bible only described one act of creation: that of white people. In his essay for the Christian Examiner, Agassiz attempted to reconcile the two by arguing that all men, regardless of origin, were equal in the eyes of God, but emphasized that neither religious dogma nor politics was relevant to what he deemed a purely scientific inquiry.
Yet, pages later, he prescribed his own plan: that men of different races occupy their distinct positions in society. It was impossible to separate the racist science from its political environment. Though Agassiz considered himself an opponent of slavery, he maintained that there were profound differences between the races which made them unequal.
One of the most vocal, a doctor by the name of Josiah C. It is hard to understand how Agassiz could have expected that his arguments could be used otherwise. One of his biographers, Edward Lurie, suggested in that as a foreigner, Agassiz could not understand the full significance of his actions but was nonetheless drawn to the flame of public attention. To Agassiz, the natural world was a window into the mind of God.
He was so focused on the philosophical and the divine that he often overlooked the material implications of his research. But while his work on fish fossils and glaciers had few political stakes, his theory on the origins of men had countless ones.
For Agassiz to argue that he was simply concerned with matters of science, he had to insist that he saw Black people strictly as specimens and nothing more — an inherently false position. In March of , Agassiz commissioned J. Zealy, a local daguerreotypist, to photograph seven enslaved people from plantations in Columbia, S. He had just traveled to Charleston to attend a scientific meeting on the polygenism debate when he received an invitation to examine African-born enslaved people in Columbia.
Agassiz's works on living and fossil fishes and on glaciers have remained classics. His work on glaciers revolutionized geology, and drove another nail in the coffin of the Biblical Flood as a serious scientific hypothesis. He left a mark on the development and the practice of American science, and brought science to "the man in the street" as no one else had before.
People from all over the world read his books, sent him specimens, and asked his advice. By the time of his death, on December 14, , he was the most famous scientist in America, and although he actually published few major scientific works after he emigrated, his popular books and public lectures made him extremely well-known and respected by the public. Scientifically, however, he was being left behind by his absolute rejection of evolution and his insistence on glaciers as a major force that shaped geology worldwide.
Agassiz was also being left behind by his racist attitudes, which were extreme even for his day. In the early and mids there was considerable scientific debate about the origins of humans and of human races, and about just how different human groups were.
Unlike Darwin and others, who thought that humans all belonged to one species and that their populations had differentiated through time as they spread geographically and adapted to new environments, Agassiz could not accept that all groups of humans belonged to the same species, and he argued vehemently for the inferiority of non-white human groups. He was not alone in this; several prominent scientists saw populational differences as major and discontinuous, and used various statistical and other arguments to support this.
But Agassiz was also physically revulsed by the idea that all humans were equal. In this feeling he was not alone, but increasingly he was seen as the product of a bygone age himself. His philosophy of nature, aiming to understand the Divine Plan, is the last great expression of the old school of natural theology, started by men like John Ray almost two hundred years before.
Agassiz was Swiss, and so he knew glaciers well. When he came to America, he found only mountain glaciers in the west, but he saw many features which he knew from Switzerland and which were associated with glaciers eskers , moraines , outwash , kettle lakes , drumlins , kame terraces.
Glacial Lakes around Michigan. The hypothesis upset many people, because it conflicted with other ideas. But it has survived for years of severe testing, mainly because no one could propose an idea which explained everything seen so directly.
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