The paper, which is accompanied by about 10 slides, retells the story of one of the last great specimen-collecting trips undertaken by Americans, the Thayer expedition to Brazil in 1865/66. In his tireless search for the elements of God's plan for the universe and bent on salvaging his own dwindling scientific reputation, the Swiss-born and recently naturalized American Louis Agassiz, Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard University, turned to Brazil in the hope that there he would find the ultimate proof that Charles Darwin was wrong. While, in the hands of Agassiz, natural history had superficially modernized and professionalized itself into a corporate enterprise (with a whole country supplying specimens to the party of traveling American naturalists), its aims--the total explanation of God's universe, from the jellyfish to the glaciers that had formed the continents--had already become anachronistic. Journey in Brazil (1868) is less a description of a foreign country, the record of a risky search for the unknown, than a tangle of chatty stories in which natural history already appears as a quotation, relegated to the footnotes and appendices contributed by Louis Agassiz, expertly framed by a narrative written, mostly from the tourist's point of view, by Agassiz's wife Elizabeth. As a comparison with earlier reports about expeditions to Brazil--notably the English naturalist Alfred Russel Warren's amazing Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853)--shows, the element of surprise has completely disappeared from the Agassizes' narrative: the more they travel, the more things remain the same.
In his letters as well as his unpublished diary and pencil sketches, one of the participants in the expedition, 23-year-old William James, emerges as a satirical commentator on its failed ambitions. In his wife's admiring vignettes, Louis Agassiz is usually portrayed as a kind of latter-day, steam-propelled Columbus, the harbinger of American superiority in Brazil, who is always surrounded by hordes of eager natives proffering natural history specimens. William James's notes, however, represent the Harvard professor as a somewhat pompous General Sherman in command of insufficiently motivated troops and morbidly fascinated by the specter of Brazilian miscegenation. Decades later, James would still praise Agassiz for his "acquaintance with vast volumes of detail" and his aversion to "theoretic generalities." But in his own work, "intended to overhaul the very idea of truth," James had come to be suspicious of what had been the implicit basis of traditional natural history and the travel narratives written by naturalists: the "duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality."
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