Louis Agassiz as a Teacher Part 1

Louis Aga.s.siz as a Teacher.

by Lane Cooper.

PREFACE

If it be asked why a teacher of English should be moved to issue this book on Aga.s.siz, my reply might be: 'Read the Introductory Note'-for the answer is there. But doubtless the primary reason is that I have been taught, and I try to teach others, after a method in essence identical with that employed by the great naturalist. And I might go on to show in some detail that a doctoral investigation in the humanities, when the subject is well chosen, serves the same purpose in the education of a student of language and literature as the independent, intensive study of a living or a fossil animal, when prescribed by Aga.s.siz to a beginner in natural science. But there is no need to elaborate the point. Of those who are likely to examine the book, some already know the underlying truth involved, others will grasp it when it is first presented to them (and for these my slight and pleasant labors are designed), and the rest will find a stumbling-block and foolishness--save for the entertainment to be had in the reading of biography.

I have naturally kept in mind the needs of my own students, past and present, yet I believe these pages may be useful to students of natural science as well as to those who concern themselves with the humanities.

We live in an age of narrow specialization--at all events in America.

Aga.s.siz was a specialist, but not a 'narrow' one. His example should therefore be salutary to those persons, on the one hand, who think that a man can have general culture without knowing some one thing from the bottom up, and, on the other, to those who immerse themselves and their pupils blindly in special investigation, without thought of the _prima philosophia_ that gives life and meaning to all particular knowledge. There can be no doubt that science and scholars.h.i.+p in this country are suffering from a lack of sympathy and contact between the devotees of the several branches, and for want of definite efforts to bridge the gaps between various disciplines wherever this is possible.

It may not often be possible until men of science generally again take up the study of Plato and Aristotle, or at least busy themselves, as did Aga.s.siz, with some comprehensive modern philosopher like Sch.e.l.ling.

But it should not be very hard for those who are engaged in the biological sciences and those who are given to literary pursuits to realize that they are alike interested in the manifestations of one and the same thing, the principle of life. In Aga.s.siz himself the vitality of his studies and the vitality of the man are easily identified.

In conclusion I must thank the publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company, for the use of selections from the copyright books of Mrs. Aga.s.siz and Professor Shaler; these and all other obligations are, I trust, indicated in the proper places by footnotes. I owe a special debt of grat.i.tude to Professor Burt G. Wilder for his interest and help throughout.

LANE COOPER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY,

April 7, 1917.

I

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

When the question was put to Aga.s.siz, 'What do you regard as your greatest work?' he replied: 'I have taught men to observe.' And in the preamble to his will he described himself in three words as 'Louis Aga.s.siz, Teacher.'

We have more than one reason to be interested in the form of instruction employed by so eminent a scientist as Aga.s.siz. In the first place, it is much to be desired that those who concern themselves with pedagogy should give relatively less heed to the way in which subjects, abstractly considered, ought to be taught, and should pay more attention than I fear has been paid to the way in which great and successful teachers actually have taught their pupils. As in other fields of human endeavor, so in teaching: there is a portion of the art that cannot be taken over by one person from another, but there is a portion, and a larger one than at first sight may appear, that can be so taken over, and can be almost directly utilized. Nor is the possible utility of imitation diminished, but rather increased, when we contemplate the method of a teacher like Aga.s.siz, whose mental operations had the simplicity of genius, and in whose habits of instruction the fundamentals of a right procedure become very obvious.

Yet there is a second main reason for our interest. Within recent years we have witnessed an extraordinary development in certain studies, which, though superficially different from those pursued by Aga.s.siz, have an underlying bond of unity with them, but which are generally carried on without reference to principles governing the investigation of every organism and all organic life. I have in mind, particularly, the spread of literary and linguistic study in America during the last few decades, and the lack of a common standard of judgment among those who engage in such study. Most persons do not, in fact, discern the close, though not obvious, relation between investigation in biology or zoology and the observation and comparison of those organic forms which we call forms of literature and works of art. Yet the notion that a poem or a speech should possess the organic structure, as it were, of a living creature is basic in the thought of the great literary critics of all time. So Aristotle, a zoologist as well as a systematic student of literature, compares the essential structure of a tragedy to the form of an animal. And so Plato, in the _Phaedrus_, makes Socrates say: 'At any rate, you will allow that every discourse ought to be a living creature, having a body of its own, and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one another and to the whole.' It would seem that to Plato an oration represents an organic idea in the mind of the human creator, the orator, just as a living animal represents a constructive idea in the mind of G.o.d. Now it happens that Aga.s.siz, considered in his philosophical relations, was a Platonist, since he clearly believed that the forms of nature expressed the eternal ideas of a divine intelligence.

Accordingly, his method of teaching cannot fail to be illuminating to the teacher of literature--or to the teacher of language, either, since each language as a whole, and also the component parts of language, words, for instance, are living and growing forms, and must be studied as organisms. We have perhaps heard too much of 'laboratory'

methods in the teaching of English and the like; but none of us has heard too much about the fundamental operations of observation and comparison in the study of living forms, or of the way in which great teachers have developed the original powers of the student. It is simply the fact that, reduced to the simplest terms, there is but a single method of investigating the objects of natural science and the productions of human genius. We study a poem, the work of man's art, in the same way that Aga.s.siz made Shaler study a fish, the work of G.o.d's art; the object in either case is to discover the relation between form or structure and function or essential effect. It was no chance utterance of Aga.s.siz when he said that a year or two of natural history, studied as he understood it, would give the best kind of training for any other sort of mental work.

The following pa.s.sages will ill.u.s.trate Aga.s.siz's ideals and practice in teaching, the emphasis being laid upon his dealings with special students. A few biographical details are introduced in order to round out our conception of the personality of the teacher himself. Toward the close, certain of his opinions are given in his own words.

I would call special attention to an extract from Boeckh's _Encyclopadie_, and another from the _Symposium_ of Plato, on pp. 69-74, and to the similarity between the method of study there enjoined upon the student of the humanities, or indeed of all art and nature, and the method imposed by Aga.s.siz upon the would-be entomologist who was compelled first of all to observe a fish. In reforming the mind it is well to begin by contemplating some structure we never have seen before, concerning which we have no, or the fewest possible, preconceptions.

II

AGa.s.sIZ AT NEUCHATEL

[Footnote: From E. C. Aga.s.siz, _Louis Aga.s.siz, his Life and Correspondence_, pp. 206 ff. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885.]

[In the autumn of the year 1832] Aga.s.siz a.s.sumed the duties of his professors.h.i.+p at Neuchatel. His opening lecture, upon the relations between the different branches of natural history and the then prevailing tendencies of all the sciences, was given on the 12th of November ... at the Hotel de Ville. Judged by the impression made upon the listeners as recorded at the time, this introductory discourse must have been characterized by the same broad spirit of generalization which marked Aga.s.siz's later teaching. Facts in his hands fell into their orderly relation as parts of a connected whole, and were never presented merely as special or isolated phenomena. From the beginning his success as an instructor was undoubted. He had, indeed, now entered upon the occupation which was to be from youth to old age the delight of his life. Teaching was a pa.s.sion with him, and his power over his pupils might be measured by his own enthusiasm. He was intellectually, as well as socially, a democrat, in the best sense. He delighted to scatter broadcast the highest results of thought and research, and to adapt them even to the youngest and most uninformed minds. In his later American travels he would talk of glacial phenomena to the driver of a country stagecoach among the mountains, or to some workman, splitting rock at the road-side, with as much earnestness as if he had been discussing problems with a brother geologist; he would take the common fisherman into his scientific confidence, telling him the intimate secrets of fish-structure or fish-embryology, till the man in his turn became enthusiastic, and began to pour out information from the stores of his own rough and untaught habits of observation. Aga.s.siz's general faith in the susceptibility of the popular intelligence, however untrained, to the highest truths of nature, was contagious, and he created or developed that in which he believed....

Beside his cla.s.ses at the gymnasium, Aga.s.siz collected about him, by invitation, a small audience of friends and neighbors, to whom he lectured during the winter on botany, on zoology, on the philosophy of nature. The instruction was of the most familiar and informal character, and was continued in later years for his own children and the children of his friends. In the latter case the subjects were chiefly geology and geography in connection with botany, and in favorable weather the lessons were usually given in the open air....

From some high ground affording a wide panoramic view Aga.s.siz would explain to them the formation of lakes, islands, rivers, springs, water -sheds, hills, and valleys....

When it was impossible to give the lessons out of doors, the children were gathered around a large table, where each one had before him or her the specimens of the day, sometimes stones and fossils, sometimes flowers, fruits, or dried plants. To each child in succession was explained separately what had first been told to all collectively....

The children took their own share in the instruction, and were themselves made to point out and describe that which had just been explained to them. They took home their collections, and as a preparation for the next lesson were often called upon to cla.s.sify and describe some unusual specimen by their own unaided efforts.

III

AGa.s.sIZ AT HARVARD

[Footnote: From E. C. Aga.s.siz, _Louis Aga.s.siz, his Life and Correspondence_, pp. 564 ff. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885.]

On his return to Cambridge at the end of September [1859], Aga.s.siz found the Museum building well advanced. It was completed in the course of the next year, and the dedication took place on the 13th of November, 1860. The transfer of the collections to their new and safe abode was made as rapidly as possible, and the work of developing the inst.i.tution under these more favorable conditions moved steadily on.

The lecture-rooms were at once opened, not only to students, but to other persons not connected with the University. Especially welcome were teachers of schools, for whom admittance was free. It was a great pleasure to Aga.s.siz thus to renew and strengthen his connection with the teachers of the State, with whom, from the time of his arrival in this country, he had held most cordial relations, attending the Teachers' Inst.i.tutes, visiting the normal schools, and a.s.sociating himself actively, as far as he could, with the interests of public education in Ma.s.sachusetts. From this time forward his college lectures were open to women as well as to men. He had great sympathy with the desire of women for larger and more various fields of study and work, and a certain number of women have always been employed as a.s.sistants at the Museum.

The story of the next three years was one of unceasing but seemingly uneventful work. The daylight hours from nine or ten o'clock in the morning were spent, with the exception of the hour devoted to the school, at the Museum, not only in personal researches and in lecturing, but in organizing, distributing, and superintending the work of the laboratories, all of which was directed by him. Pa.s.sing from bench to bench, from table to table, with a suggestion here, a kindly but scrutinizing glance there, he made his sympathetic presence felt by the whole establishment. No man ever exercised a more genial personal influence over his students and a.s.sistants.

His initiatory steps in teaching special students of natural history were not a little discouraging. Observation and comparison being in his opinion the intellectual tools most indispensable to the naturalist, his first lesson was one in _looking_. He gave no a.s.sistance; he simply left his student with the specimen, telling him to use his eyes diligently, and report upon what he saw. He returned from time to time to inquire after the beginner's progress, but he never asked him a leading question, never pointed out a single feature of the structure, never prompted an inference or a conclusion. This process lasted sometimes for days, the professor requiring the pupil not only to distinguish the various parts of the animal, but to detect also the relation of these details to more general typical features. His students still retain amusing reminiscences of their despair when thus confronted with their single specimen; no aid to be had from outside until they had wrung from it the secret of its structure. But all of them have recognized the fact that this one lesson in looking, which forced them to such careful scrutiny of the object before them, influenced all their subsequent habits of observation, whatever field they might choose for their special subject of study....

But if Aga.s.siz, in order to develop independence and accuracy of observation, threw his students on their own resources at first, there was never a more generous teacher in the end than he. All his intellectual capital was thrown open to his pupils. His original material, his unpublished investigations, his most precious specimens, his drawings and ill.u.s.trations were at their command. This liberality led in itself to a serviceable training, for he taught them to use with respect the valuable, often unique, objects entrusted to their care.

Out of the intellectual good-fellows.h.i.+p which he established and encouraged in the laboratory grew the warmest relations between his students and himself. Many of them were deeply attached to him, and he was extremely dependent upon their sympathy and affection. By some among them he will never be forgotten. He is still their teacher and their friend, scarcely more absent from their work now than when the glow of his enthusiasm made itself felt in his personal presence.

IV

HOW AGa.s.sIZ TAUGHT PROFESSOR SHALER

[Footnote: From _The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler_, pp. 93-100. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1907.]

At the time of my secession from the humanities, Aga.s.siz was in Europe; he did not return, I think, until the autumn of 1859. I had, however, picked up several acquaintances among his pupils, learned what they were about, and gained some notion of his methods. After about a month he returned, and I had my first contact with the man who was to have the most influence on my life of any of the teachers to whom I am indebted. I shall never forget even the lesser incidents of this meeting, for this great master by his presence gave an importance to his surroundings, so that the room where you met him, and the furniture, stayed with the memory of him. When I first met Louis Aga.s.siz, he was still in the prime of his admirable manhood; though he was then fifty-two years old, and had pa.s.sed his constructive period, he still had the look of a young man. His face was the most genial and engaging that I had ever seen, and his manner captivated me altogether.

But as I had been among men who had a free swing, and for a year among people who seemed to me to be cold and super-rational, hungry as I doubtless was for human sympathy, Aga.s.siz's welcome went to my heart--I was at once his captive. It has been my good chance to see many men of engaging presence and ways, but I have never known his equal.

As the personal quality of Aga.s.siz was the greatest of his powers, and as my life was greatly influenced by my immediate and enduring affection for him, I am tempted to set forth some incidents which show that my swift devotion to my new-found master was not due to the accidents of the situation, or to any boyish fancy. I will content myself with one of those stories, which will of itself show how easily he captivated men, even those of the ruder sort. Some years after we came together, when indeed I was formally his a.s.sistant,--I believe it was in 1866,--he became much interested in the task of comparing the skeletons of thoroughbred horses with those of common stock. I had at his request tried, but without success, to obtain the bones of certain famous stallions from my acquaintances among the racing men in Kentucky. Early one morning there was a fire, supposed to be incendiary, in the stables in the Beacon Park track, a mile from the College, in which a number of horses had been killed, and many badly scorched. I had just returned from the place, where I had left a mob of irate owners and jockeys in a violent state of mind, intent on finding some one to hang. I had seen the chance of getting a valuable lot of stallions for the Museum, but it was evident that the time was most inopportune for suggesting such a disposition of the remains. Had I done so, the results would have been, to say the least, unpleasant.

As I came away from the profane lot of hors.e.m.e.n gathered about the rums of their fortunes or their hopes, I met Aga.s.siz almost running to seize the chance of specimens. I told him to come back with me, that we must wait until the mob had spent its rage; but he kept on. I told him further that he risked spoiling his good chance, and finally that he would have his head punched; but he trotted on. I went with him, in the hope that I might protect him from the consequences of his curiosity.

When we reached the spot, there came about a marvel; in a moment he had all those raging men at his command. He went at once to work with the horses which had been hurt, but were savable. His intense sympathy with the creatures, his knowledge of the remedies to be applied, his immediate appropriation of the whole situation, of which he was at once the master, made those rude folk at once his friends. n.o.body asked who he was, for the good reason that he was heart and soul of them. When the task of helping was done, then Aga.s.siz skilfully came to the point of his business--the skeletons--and this so dexterously and sympathetically, that the men were, it seemed, ready to turn over the living as well as the dead beasts for his service. I have seen a lot of human doing, much of it critically as actor or near observer, but this was in many ways the greatest. The supreme art of it was in the use of a perfectly spontaneous and most actually sympathetic motive to gain an end. With others, this state of mind would lead to affectation; with him, it in no wise diminished the quality of the emotion. He could measure the value of the motive, but do it without lessening its moral import.