“Somebody will be shot,” said Longfellow, explaining that Emerson was too vague to be trusted with a gun. Longfellow’ s works of poetry include a birthday ballad in praise of Agassiz, which Longfellow read aloud at the Saturday Club, and in which Nature addressed the Professor:
“Come wander with me,” she said, “Into regions yet untrod; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God.”
John Greenleaf Whittier also wrote a poem about Agassiz, more than a hundred lines in length, ten of which are these:
Said the Master to the youth: ‘We have come in search of truth, Trying with uncertain key Door by door of mystery; We are reaching, through His laws, To the garment-hem of Cause, Him, the endless, unbegun, The unnmneable, the One Light of all our light the Source, Life of life, and Force of force.”
Longfellow, travelling in Europe in i868, called on Charles Darwin. “What a set of men you have in Camb1idge,” Darwin said to him. “Both our universities put together cannot furnish the like. Why, there is Agassiz-he counts for three.” Darwin’s generosity was remarkable in the light of Agassiz’s reaction to The Origin of Species. As Agassiz summarized it: “The world has arisen in some way or co-working space amsterdam other. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin’s theory, like all other attempts to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.” Agassiz never accepted Darwinian evolution. Many years earlier, as a young man, and as a result of his paleontological researches, he wrote the following:
More than fifteen hundred species co-working space eindhoven of fossil fishes with which I have become acquainted say to me that the species do not pass gradually from one to the other, but appear and disappear suddenly without direct relations with their predecessors; for I do not think that it can be seriously maintained that the numerous types of Cycloids and Ctenoids, which are nearly all contemporaneous with each other, descend from the Placoids and Ganoids. It would be as well to affirm that the mammals, and man with them, descend directly from fishes.