Brave Companions

That Uncle Tom would one day be used as a term of derision (“A Negro who is held to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to whites,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary) she would have found impossible to fathom, and heartbreaking. For her he was something very close to a black Christ. He is the one character in all her book who li

Everything that he undertook had to be done on a grand, heroic scale.

I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your exper

His change in plans, the decision to stay, came one year after his arrival, in September 1847, when he was offered the chair of natural history at the Lawrence Scientific School, an institution newly established at Harvard partly for the purpose of keeping him in the United States.

Several times in his book, to substantiate one point or another, Darwin had referred to observations by Agassiz (on embryological succession, for example). But Darwin’s conclusions were “the sum of wrong-headedness,” Agassiz told his students. Darwin’s theory, Agassiz instructed the members of the Boston Society of Natural History, was “ingenious b

Progress there had been, the long record of life on Earth was indeed an upward path. The changes, however, had been achieved, he insisted, in great creative stages, these divided by momentous catastrophe. His doctrine, the cataclysmic theory of his own great master, Cuvier, was that all life on the planet had been destroyed repeatedly in order to s

If I had to wish one wish for my children, I would wish that they were interested in natural history, because I think there you get a spiritual well-being that you can get no other way, and what is more, life can never be long enough. . . .

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

His writings and lectures on the Ice Age lent a whole new aura to the New England landscape just at the time when the New England landscape was being “discovered” by poets and painters, and White Mountain hotels had become the rage.

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