---
title: "Parable of the Sunfish"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sunfish"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:01.010546+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

At length on the seventh day, came the question "Well?" and my disgorge of learning to him as he sat on the edge of my table puffing his cigar. At the end of the hour's telling, he swung off and away, saying "That is not right."

Shaler concluded Agassiz was testing him to see if he was capable of "doing hard, continuous work without the support of a teacher" and redoubled his efforts, starting from scratch and, over the course of seven ten-hour days, managed to describe the specimen to Agassiz's satisfaction.

=== Scudder's "Look at your fish!" ===

Samuel Hubbard Scudder recorded a similar experience, first published in 1874 as "Look at Your Fish" in Every Saturday magazine. Agassiz again starts his new student off with a fish preserved in alcohol and instructs the student to "look at it", and promises "by and by I will ask what you have seen". As opposed to Pound's decomposing sunfish, Scudder's account emphasizes the care taken to keep the specimen in good condition:

I was to keep the fish before me in a tin tray, and occasionally moisten the surface with alcohol from the jar ... In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish, and started in search of the Professor – who had, however, left the Museum; and when I returned, after lingering over some of the odd animals stored in the upper apartment, my specimen was dry all over. I dashed the fluid over the fish as if to resuscitate the beast from a fainting fit, and looked with anxiety for a return of the normal sloppy appearance. This little excitement over, nothing was done but to return to a steadfast gaze at my mute companion.

Scudder provides the additional detail that "instruments of all kinds were interdicted", including any magnifying glass. After several hours Agassiz asks for a report and Scudder describes "the fringed gill-arches and moveable operculum; the pores of the head, fleshy lips and lidless eyes; the lateral line, the spinous fins and forked tail; the compressed and arched body". Disappointed, Agassiz informs his student that he has failed to observe "the most conspicuous features of the animal" and commands him to "look again, look again!" The mortified Scudder is eventually asked to consider overnight what he has seen, and is able to report to Agassiz the following morning that "the fish has symmetrical sides with paired organs", which was the observation Agassiz was looking for. However, when Scudder then asked what he should do next, Agassiz replied, "Oh, look at your fish!" which Scudder did for another two full days.

=== Cooper's Louis Agassiz as a Teacher ===
In 1917, English professor Lane Cooper from Cornell University published a collection of reminiscences of Agassiz. The book included notes from several notable contributors, including Scudder and Cooper, William James, Professor Addison Emery Verrill ("[Agassiz's] plan was to make young students depend on natural objects rather than on statements in books"), and Professor Edward S. Morse, who wrote that Agassiz's method was "simply to let the student study intimately one object at a time." Cooper prefigures Pound's interest by remarking on the "close, though not obvious, relation between investigation in biology or zoology and the observation and comparison of these organic forms which we call form of literature and works of art", concluding that "We study a poem, the work of man's art, in the same way that Agassiz made Shaler study a fish." Critic Robert Scholes concludes that Pound had access to this book and used the material within it as the source for the parable that opens ABC of Reading.

== Interpretation and criticism ==

=== Agassiz ===
Science historian Mary P. Winsor provides extensive commentary on Agassiz's initial assignments for his students.  The solution to the "riddle", as she calls it, lies in a similar anecdote given by Agassiz in his Essay on Classification:Suppose that the innumerable articulated animals, which are counted by tens of thousands, nay, perhaps by hundreds of thousands, had never made their appearance upon the surface of the globe, with one single exception:  that, for instance, our Lobster (Homarus americanus) were the only representative of that extraordinarily diversified type,—how should we introduce that species of animals in our systems?
Agassiz provides several potential solutions:  the species of lobster could have a single genus "by the side of all the other classes with their orders, families, etc.", or a family with one genus and one species, or a class with one order and one genus, etc.  Agassiz concludes a single species is sufficient to derive the entirety of the hierarchy:  at the time, this would have been "a distinct genus, a distinct family, a distinct class, a distinct branch."  The point of the sunfish is not observing characteristics that distinguish individuals, species and genus, but rather characteristics that are held in common higher up the taxonomic hierarchy.  Scudder's observation that finally satisfies Agassiz is that the sunfish has bilateral, paired organs; a characteristic that Winsor notes is common to all vertebrates.