Bully for Brontosaurus (31 page)

AS MY SON GROWS
, I have monitored the changing fashions in kiddie culture for words expressing deep admiration—what I called “cool” in my day, and my father designated “swell.” The half-life seems to be about six months, as “excellent” (with curious lingering emphasis on the first syllable) gave way to “bad” (extended, like a sheep bleat, long enough to turn into its opposite), to “wicked,” to “rad” (short for radical). The latest incumbent—“awesome”—possesses more staying power, and has been reigning for at least two years. My only objection, from the fuddy-duddy’s corner, lies in kiddie criteria for discernment. Ethan’s buddies require such a tiny extension beyond the ordinary to proclaim something “awesome”—just a little bit bigger, brighter, and, especially, louder will do. This or that is proclaimed awesome every second sentence—and we have a lost a wonderful English word.

Now let me tell you about awesome—the real thing, when adults still held possession of the concept. I collected fossils all my youthful life, or at least on those rare occasions of departure from the asphalt of New York City. I had amassed, by the end of college, five cartonsful, all ordered and labeled—and I was pretty proud of both quantity and quality. Then I got my present job as curator of fossil invertebrates at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. I came to Cambridge with my five cartons and discovered that my new stewardship extended to 15,000 drawers of fossils, including some of the world’s finest and oldest specimens, brought from Europe by Louis Agassiz more than a century ago. I put the cartons in a back corner of my office twenty years ago this month. I have never opened them. Me with my five cartons facing those 15,000 drawers—that is awe.

But when awe subsides, ecstasy creeps in. For I had 15,000 drawers to open, each harboring a potential discovery or insight. Raise to the
n
th power any simile you ever heard for “as happy as”—a boy in a candy store, a pig in…well, you know what. I spent two weeks pulling out every last drawer, and I found a cornucopia of disparate objects that have fueled my aesthetic and intellectual pleasure ever since.

The fossils were sublime, but I found as much fascination in the odd paraphernalia of culture that, for various reasons, end up in museum drawers. Late eighteenth century apothecary boxes, thread cases from the mills of Lawrence, Victorian cigar boxes of gaudy Cuban design—all the better to house fossils. Tickets to Lowell Institute lecture series by Gray, Agassiz, and Lyell, invitations to a ball honoring Napoleon III, merchants’ calling cards from Victorian Cincinnati—all the better (on their blank obverses) to label fossils. Pages from the Sears catalogue for 1903, snippets of nineteenth-century newspapers—all the better to wrap fossils. The most interesting news item, a headline from a Cincinnati paper for July 11, 1881, read “Garfield’s Grit” and announced that the president, though severely wounded in the recent assassination attempt, “is now on the sunny side of life again,” and would almost surely recover—the flip side to a happy Harry Truman holding that 1948
Chicago Tribune
headline announcing Dewey’s victory.

For my most interesting discovery, I opened a drawer late one night and found only a jumble of specimens inside. Someone had obviously overturned the drawer and dumped the contents. But the thick layer of dust identified the disordered pile as a very old jumble. Inside, I found the following note:

The guilty note from N.S. Shaler, left in a drawer to forestall Agassiz’s wrath.

I developed an immediate dislike for this pusillanimous assistant—fingering the janitor, distancing himself even further from responsibility by assuring the boss that he hadn’t been there at the time, then feeling a bit guilty for placing Mr. Grant’s job in jeopardy and praising him for zeal through the back door. I then looked at the date and signature—Cambridge, April 26, 1869, N. S. Shaler.

David lamented over Saul: “How are the mighty fallen.” But one might look the other way in ontogeny and observe, “How meek are the mighty when young and subservient.” Nathaniel Southgate Shaler became one of the greatest and most popular teachers in the history of Harvard University. He was a giant among late nineteenth century American naturalists. But in 1869, Shaler was just a junior professor without tenure, and his superior was the most powerful and imperious biologist in America—none other than Louis Agassiz himself. Obviously, Shaler had written that note in mortal fear of Agassiz’s celebrated wrath. Equally obviously, Agassiz had never found out—for Shaler became professor of paleontology later that year, while a century of undisturbed dust still lies atop the jumbled specimens.

N. S. Shaler reaped the rewards of his unflinching loyalty to Agassiz. The path of devotion was not smooth. Agassiz was a transplanted European with an Old World sense of professorial authority. He told students what they would study, awarded degrees by oral examination and direct assessment of competence, and insisted upon personal approval for any publication based on material at his museum. He never failed in encouragement, warmth, and enthusiasm—and he was a beloved teacher. But he never relinquished one iota of authority. These attitudes might only have yielded a tightly run ship in times of intellectual quiescence, but Agassiz was captain on the most troubled waters of biological history. Agassiz opened his museum in 1859, the same year that Darwin published
The Origin of Species
. He gathered around himself the most promising, and therefore most independently minded, group of young zoologists in America, Shaler included. Inevitably, evolution became the chief subject of discussion. With equal inevitability, students flocked eagerly to’ this beacon of intellectual excitement and became enthusiastic converts. But Agassiz had built both a career and a coherent philosophy upon the creationist premise that species are ideas in God’s mind, made incarnate by his hand in a world of material objects. Sooner shall a camel pass through the eye of a needle than the old lion and young wolf cubs shall dwell in harmony amidst such disagreement.

And so, inevitably once more, Agassiz’s students revolted—against both his overweening authority and his old-fashioned ideas. In 1863, they formed what they called, in half-jest, a committee for the protection of American students from foreign-born professors. Agassiz, however, held all the cards in a hierarchical world, and he booted the rebels out, much to the benefit of American science, as they formed departments and centers at other great universities. Agassiz then staffed his museum with older and uncontroversial professionals, bringing peace and mediocrity once again to Harvard.

Of his truly excellent students, only Shaler remained loyal. And Shaler reaped his earthly reward. He received his bachelor of science in geology,
summa cum laude
, in July 1862. After a spell of service in the Civil War, fighting for the Union from his native-Kentucky, Shaler returned to Harvard in 1864. Agassiz, describing Shaler as “the one of my American students whom I love the best,” appointed him assistant in paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1869, soon after he penned the guilty note that would lie unread for exactly 100 years (I found it in 1969), Shaler received his lifetime appointment as professor of geology, succeeding Agassiz (who continued to lecture in zoology until he died in 1873). There Shaler remained until his death in 1906, writing numerous treatises on everything from the geology of Martha’s Vineyard to the nature of morality and immortality. He also became, by far, Harvard’s most popular professor. His classes overflowed, and his students poured forth praise for his enthusiasm, his articulateness, and the comfort, optimism, and basic conventionality of his words, spoken to the elite at the height of America’s gilded age. On the day of his funeral, flags in city buildings and student fraternities flew at half-mast, and many shops closed. Thirty years later, at the Harvard tercentenary of 1936, Shaler was named twelfth among the fifty people most important to the history of Harvard. To this day, his bust rests, with only fourteen others, including Franklin’s, Longfellow’s, and, of course, Agassiz’s, in the faculty room of Bullfinch’s University Hall (and you can take my word for it; I made a special field trip over there and counted).

Shaler’s loyalty to Agassiz, and to comfortable convention in general, held as strongly in ideology as in practice. Shaler wrote these words of condolence to Agassiz’s widow, Elizabeth Cary, founder of Radcliffe College, when Louis died in 1873: “He never was a greater teacher than now. He never was more truly at his chosen work…. While he lived I always felt myself a boy beside him.” (See David N. Livingstone,
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science
, University of Alabama Press, 1987, for the source of this quotation and an excellent account of Shaler’s intellectual life.)

I don’t think that Shaler, in his eulogy to Elizabeth, either erred or exaggerated in his chosen metaphor of subservience to Agassiz’s vision. While Shaler remained subordinate, he followed Agassiz’s intellectual lead, often with the epigone’s habit of exaggerating his master’s voice. Shaler’s very first publication provides an interesting example (“Lateral Symmetry in Brachiopoda,” 1861). Here Shaler supports both Agassiz’s creationism and his zoological classification. Brachiopods, once a dominant group in the fossil record of marine invertebrates, are now a minor component of oceanic faunas. With their bivalved shells, they look superficially like clams, but their soft anatomy is entirely distinct, and they are now classified as a separate phylum. But Georges Cuvier, Agassiz’s great mentor, had placed brachiopods with clams and snails in his phylum Mollusca—and Agassiz, whose loyalty to Cuvier matched any devotion of Shaler’s, wished both to uphold Cuvier’s classification and to use his concept of Mollusca as an argument against Darwin.

Shaler obliged in his first public performance. He affirmed Cuvier and Agassiz’s inclusion of brachiopods in the Mollusca by claiming a bilateral symmetry of soft parts similar enough to the symmetry of such “standard” forms as clams and squids to justify a conclusion of common plan in design. But he then took a swipe at Darwin’s reason for including separate groups in a single phylum by arguing that no evolutionary transition could possibly link adult brachiopod and clam. (Shaler was quite right about this, but not for his stated reason. You cannot transform a brachiopod into a clam, but then nature never did because brachiopods aren’t mollusks and the two groups are entirely separate—contrary to Shaler’s first conclusion.) The planes of bilateral symmetry are different for the two groups, Shaler argued correctly, and no transition could occur because any smooth intermediate would have to pass through a nonbilateral stage entirely inconsistent with molluscan design. Shaler wrote:

Now if you’re holding a nineteenth-century scorecard, and therefore know the players, only one man could be lurking behind this statement. Only one real Platonist of this ilk operated in America, only one leading biologist still willing to designate species as thoughts of a Creator, and taxonomic relationships as the interconnections within His mind—Louis Agassiz. Shaler, with the true zeal of the acolyte, even out-Agassized Agassiz in referring to the central character of bilateral symmetry as “the fundamental thought of the type” and then designating animal taxonomy as “a study of personified thought.” Even Agassiz was not so explicit in specifying the attributes of his God.

When the winds of inevitability blew strongly enough, and when Shaler’s own position became secure in the late 1860s, he finally embraced evolution, but ever so gently, and in a manner that would cause minimal offense to Agassiz and to any Brahmin member of the old Boston order. After Agassiz’s death, Shaler continued to espouse a version of evolution with maximal loyalty to Agassiz’s larger vision of natural harmony, and marked aversion to all Darwinian ideas of chanciness, contingency, unpredictability, opportunism, and quirkiness. He led the American Neo-Lamarckian school—a powerful group of anti-Darwinian evolutionists who held out for order, purpose, and progress in nature through the principle of inheritance for features acquired by the effort of organisms. Progress in mentality might be predictably ordained if some organisms strove for improvement during their lives and passed their achievements to their offspring. No waiting for the Darwinian chanciness of favorable environments and fortuitous variations.