Brave Companions

Once, with its price per share at $295, the Panama Railroad was the highest listed stock on the New York Exchange. There had never been a railroad to compare with it.

The legacy was truly amazing. His work on fish, the initial research on glaciers, the impact of his writing on the Ice Age, the zest and glamour he brought to American culture at a critical moment, were all contributions of the first order. His beloved Museum of Comparative Zoology—the Agassiz Museum, or simply the Agassiz, as it came to be known i

For Agassiz, as for Silliman and others, to study nature was to study the works of God. He had little use for formal religion because, as he once wrote to Dana, he had seen too much in his life of overbearing clerics and religious bigotry. But there could be no evolutionary process as depicted by Darwin for the simple reason that all species were s

His precepts on the teaching of natural history, certainly a significant part of the legacy, had far-reaching influence. “Never try to teach what you yourself do not know, and know well,” he lectured at Penikese his final summer. “Train your pupils to be observers. . . . If you can find nothing better, take a housefly or a cricket, and let each hol

Agassiz, who seldom went to church, denounced the book and its theory as atheism.

From the legal-diplomatic standpoint the undertaking was made possible by a treaty signed in Bogotá. Panama was still part of Colombia (or New Granada, as it was then known), and for years the government at Bogotá had been urging Great Britain and France to guarantee New Granada’s sovereignty over the isthmus as well as the neutrality of any future

Most important, one must become capable of hard, continuous,

Lindbergh was told by a Masai warrior that civilization is not progress. “We have known freedom far greater than yours,” he told Lindbergh, and Lindbergh never forgot the moment. “The primitive,” he wrote in Autobiography of Values, “teaches that life itself, unforced life, is progress, a fact our civilization tends more and more to overlook.” He b

The idea for a railroad to supplant all of that originated in New York in the late 1840s, shortly before the news of California gold reached the East. The founders were three unlikely, dissimilar individuals, none of whom knew anything about building a railroad, even under favorable conditions. Henry Chauncey was a Wall Street financier. William He

If asked to name my favorite book about the city, I would have to pick Margaret Leech’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Reveille in Washington, first published in 1941,