Bully for Brontosaurus

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 nth 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:

  This incident was the result of the carelessness of the Janitor Eli Grant who managed to overturn about half a dozen drawers of specimens by undertaking to move certain trays which he was not authorized to touch. The accident happened during my absence but I judge that it arose from an excess of zeal rather than from any recklessness. I have deemed it best to leave the specimens exactly as I found them awaiting an opportunity to have them arranged by Mr. Hartt.

  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 wi
th 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:

  Such a transition would require a series of forms, each of which must present a negation of that very principle of bilateral symmetry which we have found of so much importance. And must we not, therefore, conclude that the series which united these two orders is a series of thought, which is itself connected, though manifested by two structures which have no genetic relations.

  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.

  Shaler’s loyalty to Agassiz persisted right through this fundamental change from creationism to evolution. For example, though he could scarcely deny the common origin of all humans in the light of evolutionary theory, Shaler still advocated Agassiz’s distinctive view (representing the “polygenist” school of pre-Darwinian anthropology) that human races are separate species, properly and necessarily kept apart both on public conveyances and in bedrooms. Shaler argued for an evolutionary separation of races so long ago that accumulated differences had become, for all practical purposes, permanent.

  Practical purposes, in the genteel racism of patrician Boston, abetted by a slaveholding Kentucky ancestry, meant “using biology as an accomplice” (in Condorcet’s words) to advocate a “nativist” social policy (where “natives” are not the truly indigenous American Indians, but the earliest immigrants from Protestant western and northern Europe). Shaler reserved his lowest opinion for black Americans, but invested his social energies in the Immigration Restriction League and its attempts to prevent dilution of American whites (read WASPs) by the great Catholic and Jewish unwashed of southern and eastern Europe.

  One can hardly fathom the psychological and sociological complexities of racism, but the forced intellectual rationales are always intriguing and more accessible. Shaler’s own defense merged his two chief interests in geography and zoology. He argued that we live in a world of sensible and optimal pattern, devoid of quirk or caprice. People differ because they have adapted by Lamarckian means to their local environments; our capacities are a map of our original homes—and we really shouldn’t live elsewhere (hence the biological rectitude of restricting immigration). The languid tropics cannot inspire genius, and you cannot contemplate the Pythagorean absolute while trying to keep body and soul together in an igloo. Hence the tough, but tractable, lands of northern Europe yielded the best of humanity. Shaler wrote:

  Our continents and seas, cannot be considered as physical accidents in which, and on which, organic beings have found an ever-perilous resting place, but as great engines operating in a determined way to secure the advance of life.

  Shaler then applied this cardinal belief in overarching order (against the Darwinian specter of unpredictable contingency) to the largest question of all—the meaning of human life as a proof of God’s existence and benevolence. In so doing, he completed the evolutionary version of Agassiz’s dearest principle—the infusion of sensible, progressive, divine order into the cosmos, with the elevation of “man” (and I think he really meant only half of us) to the pinnacle of God’s intent. Shaler could not deny his generation’s proof of evolution, and had departed from his master in this conviction, but he had been faithful in constructing a vision of evolution so mild that it left all cosmic comfort intact, thereby affirming the deepest principle of Agassiz’s natural theology.

  Shaler rooted his argument in a simple claim about probability. (Shaler often repeated this line of reasoning. My quotations come from his last and most widely read book—The Individual: A Study of Life and Death, 1901.) Human life is the end result of an evolutionary sequence stretching back into the immensity of time and including thousands of steps, each necessary as a link in the rising sequence:

  The possibility of man’s development has rested on the successive institution of species in linked order…. If, in this succession of tens of thousands of species, living through a series of millions of years, any of these links of the human chain had been broken; if any one of the species had failed to give birth to its successor, the chance of the development of man would have been lost.

  Human evolution, Shaler holds, would have been “unattainable without the guidance of a controlling power intent on the end.” If one sequence alone could have engendered us, and if the world be ruled by Darwinian caprice and contingency, our appearance would have been “essentially impossible.” For surely, one link would have failed, one step in ten thousand been aborted, thus ending forever the ascent toward consciousness. Only divine watchfulness and intent could have produced the human mind (not a direct finger in the pot, perhaps, but at least an intelligent construction of nature’s laws with a desired end in view):

  The facts connected with the organic approach to man afford what is perhaps the strongest argument, or at least the most condensed, in favor of the opinion that there is an intelligent principle in control of the universe.

  Nathaniel Southgate Shaler was one of the most influential American intellectuals of his time. Today, he is unknown. I doubt that one in a hundred readers of this essay (geologists and Harvardians excepted) has ever heard of him. His biography rates thirteen lines in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, more than half devoted to a listing of book titles. Why has he faded, and what does his eclipse teach us about the power and permanence of human thought? We can, perhaps, best approach this question by considering one of Shaler’s best friends, a man also influenced by Agassiz, but in a different way—William Jame
s. In their day, Shaler and James were peas in a pod of Harvard fame. Now Shaler is a memory for a few professionals, and James is one of America’s great gifts to the history of human thought. Why the difference?

  William James also came under Agassiz’s spell during his student years. Agassiz decided to take six undergraduates along on his famous Thayer Expedition to Brazil (1866). They would help the trained scientists in collecting specimens and, in return, hear lectures from Agassiz on all aspects of natural history. William James, among the lucky six, certainly appreciated the value of Agassiz’s formidable intellect and pedagogical skill. He wrote to his father: “I am getting a pretty valuable training from the Prof, who pitches into me right and left and makes me [own] up to a great many of my imperfections. This morning he said I was ‘totally uneducated.’”

  But James maintained his critical perspective, while Shaler became an acolyte and then an epigone. James wrote:

  I have profited a great deal by hearing Agassiz talk, not so much by what he says, for never did a man utter a greater amount of humbug, but by learning the way of feeling of such a vast practical engine as he is…. I delight to be with him. I only saw his defects at first, but now his wonderful qualities throw them quite in the background…. I never saw a man work so hard.

  Was James “smarter” than Shaler? Does their difference in renown today reflect some basic disparity in amount of intellectual power? This is a senseless question for many reasons. Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension. What can we say? Both men had certain brilliance, but they used their skills differently. Shaler was content to follow Agassiz throughout his career, happy to employ his formidable intellect in constructing an elaborate rationale for contemporary preferences, never challenging the conservative assumptions of his class and culture. James questioned Agassiz from day one. James probed and wondered, reached and struggled every day of his life. Shaler built pretty buildings to house comfortable furniture. Intelligence or temperament; brains or guts? I don’t know. But I do know that oblivion was one man’s reward, enduring study and respect the other’s.