In his long, prolific scientific career, Agassiz had scaled the Alps to track the movement of glaciers, dredged up deep sea creatures, and canoed up the length of Lake Superior. In his writings, he was conscious of leaving the public with a particular image of himself: that of a scientist working at breakneck speed, willing to sacrifice his well-being to discover the truth about the world.
He succeeded at mythologizing himself, if only for the time being.
Weeks after Agassiz died in 1873, the Boston Society of Natural History held a memorial service for him. The former president of the group, George B. Emerson, lamented his short-lived relationship with Agassiz, blaming it in part on insecurity. “I did not deem myself worthy to occupy so much of his time, concensecrated, as it was, to science and the good of mankind,” he explained.
Like many scientists in his generation, Agassiz was a devout creationist: He believed that the world was fixed exactly as God had created it and thus merited especially careful observation. He approached his work with a reverence the public could not help but admire, at least at first.
As the decades passed, however, the scientific community began to perceive his religious beliefs as more of a hindrance than an asset. Agassiz lived long enough to see the community renounce creationism for Darwin’s theory of evolution, but vehemently resisted the shift himself — to embrace evolution would be to overturn many of the conclusions of his own work.
But the largest stain on Agassiz’s reputation comes from one of the corollaries of his belief in creationism: his belief in polygenism. Agassiz not only supported efforts to rank and segregate people of different races, but propagated the unfounded theory that different races were different species altogether. His fans occasionally used his ideas in defense of slavery, making him one of America’s leading scientific racists.
Though some historians argue it is difficult to reconcile these two visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted —, they may simply be two sides of the same coin. Agassiz prided himself on his ability to distinguish and characterize species. With his theory of polygenism, he created taxonomies not only of turtles and jellyfish but also of human beings.
