61 Facts About Louis Agassiz

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz FRS FRSE was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist who is recognized as a scholar of Earth's natural history.

Louis Agassiz emigrated to the United States in 1847 after visiting Harvard University.

Louis Agassiz went on to become professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, to head its Lawrence Scientific School, and to found its Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Louis Agassiz made institutional and scientific contributions to zoology, geology, and related areas, including multivolume research books running to thousands of pages.

Louis Agassiz is particularly known for his contributions to ichthyological classification, including of extinct species such as megalodon, and to the study of historical geology, including the founding of glaciology.

Louis Agassiz was born in the village of Motier in the Swiss Canton of Fribourg.

Louis Agassiz's father was a Protestant clergyman, as had been his progenitors for six generations, and his mother was the daughter of a physician and an intellectual in her own right, who had assisted her husband in the education of her boys.

Louis Agassiz was educated at home until he spent four years at secondary school in Bienne, which he entered in 1818 and completed his elementary studies in Lausanne.

Louis Agassiz studied at the Universities of Zurich, Heidelberg and Munich.

Louis Agassiz threw himself into the work with an enthusiasm that would go on to characterize the rest of his life's work.

In November 1832, Louis Agassiz was appointed professor of natural history at the University of Neuchatel, at a salary of about US$400 and declined brilliant offers in Paris because of the leisure for private study that that position afforded him.

In gathering materials for that work, Louis Agassiz visited the principal museums in Europe.

Louis Agassiz found that his palaeontological analyses required a new ichthyological classification.

Louis Agassiz therefore adopted a classification that divided fish into four groups, based on the nature of the scales and other dermal appendages.

That did much to improve fish taxonomy, but Louis Agassiz's classification has since been superseded.

In 1842 to 1846, Louis Agassiz issued his Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classification list with references of all names used in zoological genera and groups.

Louis Agassiz was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1843.

In 1837, Louis Agassiz proposed that the Earth had been subjected to a past ice age.

Louis Agassiz presented the theory to the Helvetic Society that ancient glaciers flowed outward from the Alps, and even larger glaciers had covered the plains and mountains of Europe, Asia, and North America and smothered the entire Northern Hemisphere in a prolonged ice age.

Louis Agassiz even had a hut constructed upon one of the Aar Glaciers and for a time made it his home to investigate the structure and movements of the ice.

Louis Agassiz visited England, and with William Buckland, the only English naturalist who shared his ideas, made a tour of the British Isles in search of glacial phenomena, and became satisfied that his theory of an ice age was correct.

In 1840, Louis Agassiz published a two-volume work, Etudes sur les glaciers.

Louis Agassiz accepted Charpentier and Schimper's idea that some of the alpine glaciers had extended across the wide plains and valleys of the Aar and Rhone, but he went further by concluding that in the recent past, Switzerland had been covered with one vast sheet of ice originating in the higher Alps and extending over the valley of northwestern Switzerland to the southern slopes of the Jura.

Louis Agassiz began with a working hypothesis which could be tested by the results of fieldwork to find either inconclusive, or conclusively supporting or refuting evidence.

Louis Agassiz had a close association with his student and field assistant, the geologist Charles Hartt who eventually refuted Louis Agassiz's theories about the Amazon based on his fieldwork there.

Louis Agassiz was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846.

In 1846, still married to Cecilie, who remained with their three children in Switzerland, Louis Agassiz met Elizabeth Cabot Cary at a dinner.

Louis Agassiz brought his children to live with them, and Elizabeth raised and developed close relationships with her step-children.

Louis Agassiz had a mostly cordial relationship with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray despite their disagreements.

Louis Agassiz believed each human race had been separately created, but Gray, a supporter of Charles Darwin, believed in the shared evolutionary ancestry of all humans.

Louis Agassiz was later decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

Louis Agassiz served as a nonresident lecturer at Cornell University while he was on faculty at Harvard.

Louis Agassiz's own writing continued with four volumes of Natural History of the United States, published from 1857 to 1862.

Louis Agassiz published a catalog of papers in his field, Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae, in four volumes between 1848 and 1854.

Stricken by ill health in the 1860s, Louis Agassiz resolved to return to the field for relaxation and to resume his studies of Brazilian fish.

Louis Agassiz's second wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, assisted him in preparing his A Journey in Brazil.

From his first marriage to Cecilie Braun, Louis Agassiz had two daughters, Ida and Pauline, and a son, Alexander.

In 1863, Louis Agassiz's daughter Ida married Henry Lee Higginson, who later founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was a benefactor to Harvard and other schools.

Louis Agassiz had a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields and taught many future scientists who would go on to prominence, including Alpheus Hyatt, David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Ernest Ingersoll, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathaniel Shaler, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, Alpheus Packard, and his son Alexander Emanuel Louis Agassiz.

Louis Agassiz had a profound impact on the paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott and the natural scientist Edward S Morse.

Louis Agassiz was grateful for the help that the women gave him in examining fossil fish specimens during his visit to Lyme Regis in 1834.

Louis Agassiz died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1873 and was buried on the Bellwort Path at Mount Auburn Cemetery, joined later by his wife.

Louis Agassiz's monument is a boulder from a glacial moraine of the Aar near the site of the old Hotel des Neuchatelois, not far from the spot where his hut once stood.

Louis Agassiz's grave is sheltered by pine trees from his old home in Switzerland.

In 2005, the European Geosciences Union Division on Cryospheric Sciences established the Louis Agassiz Medal, awarded to individuals in recognition of their outstanding scientific contribution to the study of the cryosphere on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system.

Louis Agassiz took part in a monthly gathering called the Saturday Club at the Parker House, a meeting of Boston writers and intellectuals.

Louis Agassiz was therefore mentioned in a stanza of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

In 1850, Louis Agassiz commissioned daguerreotypes, which were described as "haunting and voyeuristic" of the enslaved Renty Taylor and Taylor's daughter, Delia, to further his arguments about black inferiority.

Louis Agassiz left the images to Harvard, and they remained in the Peabody Museum's attic until 1976, when they were rediscovered by Ellie Reichlin, a former staff member.

Louis Agassiz was a well-known natural scientist of his generation in America.

Louis Agassiz spent much of his time with Samuel George Morton, a famous American anthropologist at the time who became well known by analyzing fossils brought back by Lewis and Clark.

Louis Agassiz made questionable judgment calls such as dismissing Hindu skull calculations from his Caucasian cranial measurements because they brought the overall average down.

Louis Agassiz repeated this lecture 10 months later to the Charleston Literary Club but changed his original stance, claiming that black people were physiologically and anatomically a distinct species.

Louis Agassiz believed that humans did not descend from one single common ancestor.

Louis Agassiz believed that like plants and animals, various regions have differentiated species of humans.

Louis Agassiz considered this hypothesis testable, and matched to the available evidence.

Louis Agassiz indicated that there were obvious geographical barriers that were the likely cause of speciation.

Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Louis Agassiz's observations sprang from racist bias, in particular from his revulsion on first encountering African-Americans in the United States.

Louis Agassiz never supported slavery and claimed his views on polygenism had nothing to do with politics.

Accusations of racism against Louis Agassiz have prompted the renaming of landmarks, schoolhouses, and other institutions that bear his name.

In 2020, the Stanford Department of Psychology asked for a statue of Louis Agassiz to be removed from the front facade of its building.