Desor vs Agassiz

Réponse à M. Agassiz

     The foregoing pages were being written, when I became aware of a work by Mr. Agassiz, entitled "Contributions to the Natural History of the U. S. of America." The author, in reviewing the works dealing with Echinoderms, also mentions the Synopsis. I should not, on account of my relations with the author, have counted on a benevolent judgement, and as I am only too well acquainted with the imperfections of my work, I expected to see them mercilessly exposed. This is not the case, however. My work has not received the honours of criticism. M. Agassiz limits himself to characterizing it as a "partial reprint of the Catalogue raisonné with additions and figures".
 

     I do not think it is very difficult to refute such an allegation. A glance at the two works will suffice to do it justice. The Catalogue raisonné is a booklet of 166 pages; the Synopsis is a volume of 490 + 60, therefore 550 pages; the former, which deals with both living and fossil echinoids, contains a total of 1010 species and two plates, while the latter, which deals only with fossil echinoids, excluding the living ones, contains 1415 species with 44 plates. Of the 1010 species of the Catalogue raisonné, about half are only listed, without being accompanied by any description or diagnose, which reduces to 546 the fossil species whose characters are indicated and about which only plagiarism can be questioned. As for the figures which are intended to clarify the text, the abuse cannot in any case be very shocking, since the Synopsis has twenty-two times more plates than the Catalogue raisonné.
 

     This is the state of affairs, regardless of the value of the works and the position of the authors.
 

     However, it cannot and must not be indifferent to a self-respecting author to be reproached for plagiarism, even if only on one point. I must therefore wish to justify myself, either by asking for a comparison of the texts, or by calling attention to my life and my works, so that it may be ascertained whether there is anything in my background that could authorise or justify an accusation of this nature.
Until someone is willing to investigate the matter, here is my categorical answer.
    

1) There is not a single diagnose in the entire Synopsis, nor a single description, either generic or specific, that is borrowed from the Catalogue raisonné.
Let us compare the two works and judge.
2°) I appeal to those of my scientific friends who have provided me with materials, who have helped me with their advice and their insights, who have in a way assisted in the often difficult elaboration of this work.
3°) If I had used part of the diagnoses of the Catalogne raisonné, I would not have been able to incur the reproach of plagiarism in any way, since the work I am accused of having reproduced is my own work and one does not plagiarise by reproducing one's own results. Only those who borrow from others are plagiarists.
I therefore reject as both false and absurd the accusation of plagiarism that Mr. Agassiz has taken pleasure in making against me. 

  But Mr Agassiz did not stop there. It seems that once one has entered the path of iniquity one goes far. One will judge by this other accusation concerning a first work, ,,the Catalogue raisonné des Echinides. This work appeared in : 1847 in the "Annales des Sciences naturelles" under the names of L. Agassiz and E. Desor, preceded by an Introduction by M. Agassiz. It is as our collective work, as the summary of our monographic work on Echinoderms, that it was received and welcomed by the scientific public and that since then it has been quoted in geological and palaeontological works. After having reviewed and coordinated the details in Paris, during the winter of 1846 to 1847, I myself took the first prints to the United States, where M. Agassiz presented them as our common work. When necessary, I will produce the testimony of several geologists who received the "Catalogue raisonné" in this capacity.
 

Soon after, differences arose between us, the causes and details of which are too unedifying to be reproduced here. Forgetting a whole past, M. Agassiz believed, in his feminine irritation, that it was in his power to bring me down from the position that sustained work had acquired for me, and for this he did not fear to have recourse to the saddest means. This can be judged from the following line. According to him, without his permission and taking advantage of his absence, I would have surreptitiously added my name to his on the title, while I would only have been responsible for correcting the proofs. I would also have eliminated several generic names by replacing them with other names of my own creation. Here is how he expresses himself verbatim on this subject. (Vol. 1. p. 97 of the Contributions).
"I quote this paper under my own name alone, because that of Mr. Desor which is added to it, has no right there. It was added by him after I had left Europe, not only without authority, but even without my learning it for a whole year. The genera Goniocidaris, Mespilia, Boletia, Lenita, Gualtieria, Lovenia, Breynia, which bear his name, while they should bear mine, as I have established and named them, while Mr. Desor was travelling in Sweden, were appropriated by him without any more right, by a mere dash of the pen, while be was carrying my manuscript through the press. How many species he bas taken to himself in the same manner, I cannot tell. As the printed work and a paper presented by me to the Academy of sciences of Paris in 1846 exhibit, for every one acquainted with zoological nomenclature, internal evidence of my statement, such for instance as my name left standing as authority for the Species of Mespilia, Lenita, Gualtieria and Breynia, while the genus bears his, need not allude further to the subject. This is one of the most extraordinary cases of plagiarism I know of.
 

This is a direct accusation of scientific prevarication. Joining cowardice to fraud, I would have abused the confidence of Mr. Agassiz and would have taken advantage of his absence to appropriate what did not belong to me.
 

In the presence of such an odious accusation coming from a man as highly placed as Mr. Agassiz, is it possible to remain silent? I ask this of every kind-hearted man; I ask it above all of those of my friends who have advised me and still advise me to ignore it in the interests of science, or to forgive it in a spirit of charity. My intimate feeling, in agreement with my conscience, tells me on the contrary that I owe it to myself, to my family and to my friends to repel calumny. I will therefore answer without passion, but also with gentleness.
 

Let us begin by noting a first point. It was in 1857, therefore after ten years had passed since our separation, that it suddenly occurred to Mr Agassiz to claim against an alleged breach of trust that I had committed to his detriment in 1847. On the other hand, it is after ten years of an intimacy, the advantages of which no one more than Mr Agassiz has praised, that I would suddenly be guilty of a black betrayal! Let us examine the circumstances in which we found ourselves at the time. Mr. Agassiz's publications had assumed extravagant proportions, which, together with other circumstances that are only too well known, had made his position rather critical. It was then that he conceived the idea of going to make his fortune in America, the King of Prussia, then Prince of Neuchâtel, offering to pay the expenses of the journey, on condition that he would send the collections he made in America to the Museums of Berlin and Neuchâtel.

Our scientific work had been too numerous for me to think of breaking such a long-standing association. I therefore decided to accompany Mr. Agassiz to the United States and to seek with him the confirmation of the various problems that we had pursued together. But before doing so, it was necessary to complete some of the work that had been started. Several of them were published in Neuchâtel and although they were published under the name of M. Agassiz, my share in them is not disputed. Others were not sufficiently advanced for printing to be started in Neuchâtel; these were the Catalogue raisonné des Echinides and the Système glaciaire. I therefore took them to Paris where we were to stay. It was in the spring of 1846. The summer was devoted by us to comparing the magnificent collection of the Jardin des Plantes and the various public and private collections in the capital. These researches led us to some interesting results which M. Agassiz summarized, with my consent, but without my participation, in a memorandum read at the Academy of Sciences on August 10, 1846 1) and which later became the Introduction to the "Catalogue raisonné. In the meantime, I went on my own to Scandinavia, to take a look at the erratic phenomena of the North, as a preparation for the studies of the same kind which we were to make on the other side of the Atlantic.
 

On my return, I could no longer find M. Agassiz in Paris; he had just embarked for Boston, leaving me the Catalogue raisonné and the Système glaciaire to complete. It was to these two works that I devoted the winter of 1846 to 1847, as those of my friends with whom I maintained regular and almost daily relations, in particular Messrs Krohn, Vogt, Ch. Martins, T. Berthoud, will testify. I also supervised the printing of the Catalogue raisonné, with the exception of the last sheets, the proofs of which were corrected by M. Marcou.

     I will refrain for the moment from speaking about the "Glacial System" which is not at stake. It is the Catalogue raisonné alone that is at stake. Now I maintain, contrary to the assertions of M. Agassiz, that this work belongs to me not only in its details, but also in its general provisions, and that if there is a name that must be removed from the title as usurped, it is certainly not mine. This is what remains for me to prove. To do this, I would like to go into a few more special details.

     One of the principal families of the order of Echinoides, if not the most important, is that of the Spatangoides or sea hearts. The classification of this family left much to be desired. If today it is more satisfactory, it is thanks to a particularity of the organisation of these animals which had gone unnoticed, the fascioles or bands. If one consults the Catalogue raisonné, one will see that it is on the form, distribution and number of fascioles that the majority of the genera of Spatangoides are based. Now this character was not known to M. Agassiz. It was during my trip to Scandinavia that my attention was first drawn to these bands, while examining the structure of the North Sea Urchins. It was with my friend M. Krohn that I completed in Paris the study of this singular organization, for which I proposed the name of fascioles, which was generally adopted.
 

Such an important criterium could not be introduced into the method without more or less modifying the existing sections. A good number of genera were corroborated and confirmed by this new procedure; others did not undergo the test and this circumstance, joined to other considerations which I will discuss later, if necessary, committed me to suppressing several of the genera proposed by M. Agassiz and to modify others. This is one of the reasons why the genera Breynia, Lovenia, Gualtieria etc. were introduced. Shall I give an example?

Here is the description given of the genus Breynia in the Catalogue raisonné, p. 118: "Two fascioles on the upper surface: one internal, as in the genus Lovenia, the other peripetal. Large tubercles on the upper surface, but only in the space circumscribed by the peripetal fasciole. The ampullae bearing the tubercles are not prominent on the outside. One sub-anal fasciole. Eyes and genital pores as in the genus Lovenia."

Is it not obvious that it is the fascioles that constitute the main criterion in this definition? But this criterion was not known to M. Agassiz until long after the Catalogue was printed. When M. Agassiz affirms that it was during my trip to Sweden that he established the genus Breynia, it is quite simply an impossibility that he alleges. I shall refrain from qualifying this procedure. It is enough for me to have pointed it out. It is true that the need for some new generic cuts had been sensed by us before the discovery of the fascioles. But it was only a vague presentiment. Nevertheless, I have pushed the self-denial to the point of honouring M. Agassiz with these new genera, whenever I could suppose that my collaborator had glimpsed them or that their creation could be justified without the help of fascioles, witness the genera Macropneustes, Eupatagus, Archiacia and several others. As for the genera that are based more exclusively on fascioles, it is obvious that it would have been absurd to attribute responsibility for them to M. Agassiz, who was completely unaware of the characters on which they are based; such are, for example, the genera Hemiaster, Gualtieria, Breynia etc. Nevertheless, in order that the Introduction to the Catalogue raisonné should not be incomplete from the start, I have completed it with the following paragraph which M. Agassiz never thought of rejecting and which has passed under his name, although it is not to be found in the edition of the Compte-Rendu.
 

"Lamarck had divided the Spatangoides into two genera, the Ananchytes and the Spatangues; the first included all the species whose anus is inframarginal, and the second those whose anus is supra-marginal. However, it is easy to see that these two genera contain very different types, especially that of the Spatangues; so I have for a long time split it into several genera, basing myself principally on the shape and structure of the ambulacra. These sections, some of which might have appeared arbitrary~ in the beginning, have been validated in the most satisfactory manner by the research of Messrs Krohn and Desor on the pedicellaria. These organs are not distributed over the whole surface of the test, as in Echinus; on the contrary, they are united in flexuous zones or cords, which are distinguished in several species by a particular coloration. When the sea urchin is devoid of its spines, these zones appear on the surface of the test in the form of apparently smooth strips; but if we examine them with a magnifying glass, we see that they are composed of very small granules, real tubercles, on which the pedicels are articulated. These strips, which I call with M. Desor fascioles, are therefore not an insignificant character, since they correspond to particular organs which are no doubt important in the organisation of these animals.
 

All the Spatangoids do not, however, have fascioles, and it is worthy of note that it is precisely the oldest in the series of lands which are devoid of them, namely the Holaster, the Toxaster, the Ananchytes and the Dysaster, that is to say, precisely the genera which are most similar to the Cassidulids "
 

My concern for the work of M. Agassiz was not limited to these additions. I have also deleted, in the Introduction to the Catalogne raisonné, several passages from the edition of the Compte-rendu, because they contained obvious errors. Thus we read (page 282) that "the existence of Echinids in the series of terrains does not seem to go back beyond the time of the deposition of the Muschelkalk. I have also deleted this other passage (p. 285) where M. Agassiz seems to find it strange that works on geology and palaeontology still generally cite Echinids, which belong to the family Crinoides, in the coalfields. And yet, at this time, Mr. Griffith's work on the Carboniferous fossils of Ireland had been published for two years (1844). If M. Agassiz had taken the trouble to consult this excellent work, he would have been assured by the descriptions and figures of M. McCoy, that there can be no doubt in their regard, that they are true Echinids.
 

It is true that this result did not fit in with a certain theory of the succession of types, according to which only Crinoids and Cystidia could have existed in the Carboniferous formation, just as it was forbidden for Reptiles to go back beyond the secondary period.
 

     Time has done justice to these pretentious theories. It is now recognised that Reptiles as well as Echinids not only exist in the deposits of the coal formation, but that they go back both naked and the others into the Devonian formation and probably further.
 

     Another error consisted in representing the Holothurians (p. 283) as "exclusively proper to the present creation". And yet M. Agassiz should have known that if the body of these animals is too soft to be preserved in the fossil state, the same cannot be said of the small calcareous crests and spicules with which their skin is covered, and which are found in a good number of terrains. The body itself has sometimes left its imprint on us; we need only recall the Synapta Sieboldi Munst.
 

     These errors, even though they have been published in the official collection of the Académie des Sciences de Paris, are nonetheless errors. But it could not suit me to see them perpetuated in a book to which my name was attached. Far from deserving reproach, I believe on the contrary that I have done science a service by correcting and deleting them, just as I believe that I have shown disinterestedness in attributing to M. Agassiz results which were the fruit of my own studies. For a discreet adversary, this would have been the place, if not to protest, at least to keep quiet.
 

     Those who have known our intimate relations on other occasions will perhaps ask me where this blindness comes from on the part of a man whose scientific position is good enough for him not to envy the success of others. In order to answer this question, I would have to go back to the cause of our disputes. Now I wish, in the interest of science, that Mr. Agassiz does not force me to leave the reserve that I have imposed on myself.
 

NEUCHATEL 1st June 1858
E. Desor. 

1) Compte rendu de l'Académie des Sciences. Tom. .XXllI. p. 276. C'est 1. seul de ses ouvrages que M. Agassiz ait rédigé lui même depuis 1840. Tous les autres sont de la plume de M. Vogt ou de la mienne. Une lecture attentive en fera foi au besoin.

* concernant la vie, l'oeuvre de Desor, je vous engage vivement à lire l'ouvrage récent de Marc-Antoine KAESER (2004) L'univers du préhistorien. Science, foi et politique dans l'oeuvre et la vie d'Edouard Desor (1811-1882). Paris, l'Hamattan ; Lausanne, Sté Hist. Nat. Suisse Romande ; 621p.