PARTISAN REVIEW
431
Hawthorne, like everyone else of any note, knew Agassiz, the ge–
ologist and biologist, who shortly became an important Harvard Pro–
fessor and the best known (if not the best) of American paleontologists.
He followed Cuvier in declaring that no evidence existed to indicate
that one animal could develop from another, or to show that there was
any genetic connection between the species of successive strata. "Spe–
cies," he said, "do not pass insensibly one into another, but ... appear
and disappear unexpectedly, without direct relation to their precur–
sors." The form of each species he calls the
type,
explaining in the
preface to his textbook that this was common parlance.
Agassiz, though a valued correspondent of Darwin, not surpris–
ingly rejected
The Origin of SPecies;
in a posthumous paper he finally
reasserted the truth of all species to their type, and denied analogies
from embryology, arguing that the metamorphoses of the foetus "have
never been known to lead
to
any transition" of one species into anoth–
er." The metamorphoses of the embryo simply culminate in its com–
pliance with its type.
With Agassiz departed the last hope of a science which could re–
gard n a tural history as a phenomenal representation of the operations
of divine providence; which thought of itself as "interpreting a system
which is not ours," a system which is a record either of God's deeds or
of his prophecies. No longer could the types be regarded as divine in–
scrip tions, as parts of a mystery both stable and divinely systematic.
But for a few years in the late Forties, immediately before Hawthorne
wrote
The Scarlet Letter
and
The House of the Seven Gables,
the ac–
knowledged scientific leader of the New England community, though
already under attack from more revolutionary biologists, argued with
every appearance of modernity and authority that they could. And so
the types of Agassiz joined, might join, in a man's mind, with those of
Emerson and those of Cotton Mather and those of Daguerre; a unique
and critical moment in the history of the word and the concept, on the
threshold of a new age and a new order.
It
is curious that the general opinion of Hawthorne scholars
should be that expressed by E. Wagenknecht when he remarks that
although Hawthorne knew Agassiz personally he had " no more inter–
es t than Dickens" in " the great scientific discussions and speculations
of the nineteenth century. " One could begin the refutation of this view
by mentioning Hawthorne's indisputable interest in mesmerism and
