Species

The Nineteenth Century, a Period of Change 131

“species” of Man: Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol, American Indian, Negro, Hottentot,

Malayan, and Australian, and claimed that these were all independent creations, not

related by descent, each with its own region, flora, and fauna. The basis for this was

not some generative notion, or reproductive isolation (since it was clear that human

“types” could interbreed without trouble), but their clear physical differences.^67 In

short, the characters indicated an absolute specific distinction. Or perhaps Man was

different.

Agassiz was not a Lockean, however; he was clearly a variety of Platonist, or at

least of idealist. He wrote:

[T]here is a system in nature, to which the different systems of authors are successive

approximations, more and more closely agreeing with it, in proportion as the human

mind has understood nature better. This growing co-incidence between our systems

and that of nature shows ... the identity of the operations of the human and the Divine

intellect ...^68

Agassiz’s biographer, Lurie, calls this Agassiz’s “cosmic philosophy,” and notes

that in his view

[s]pecies, the individual units of identity in nature, were types of thought reflecting an

ideal, immaterial inspiration. The same was true of the larger taxonomic categories—

genera, families, orders, branches, and kingdoms. All such categories had no real exis-

tence in nature. Reality could be discovered only in the character of the individual

animals and plants that had inhabited or were now inhabiting the material world. The

individual fossil or living from represented on earth the categories of divine thought

ranging from species to kingdom and ultimately symbolized a complete identity with

the highest concept of being, God.^69

Two years after the publication of his “Essay on Classification,” the Origin of
Species was released, and so the essay provides a good demarcation point between
the traditional view of classification, and the revolution that was to come, even if
Agassiz’s views were already archaic. In that essay,^70 he argued again for the stabil-
ity of species, although his primary task was to discuss ways in which naturalists
could identify and name species, rather than to define them other than as the smallest
division of the four great embranchements named by Cuvier, which Agassiz called
“great types.”^71 These were the ways of being, typical plans of nature. Species were
the lowest group that could be differentiated out of these plans (which play the role,
therefore, of Aristotle’s summum genera). They had in themselves no identifying
morphological character, because that was exhausted in the genus. Winsor notes,

[h]aving already publicly rejected the criterion of interbreeding, during the debate on

the unit of mankind, Agassiz had to ask himself what besides morphological detail

(^67) Lurie 1960, 264ff.
(^68) Agassiz 1859, 31.
(^69) Loc. cit.
(^70) Published as volume I of the Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, 1857 to 1862.
(^71) Winsor 1979, 97. See footnote to Appendix A.