Background

Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe was born on the 17th of December 1835, in Neuchatel, Switzerland. Alexander Agassiz was the son of Louis Agassiz and Cécile Braun Agassiz, the sister of the botanist Alexander Braun. His mother was Cecile Braun, the daughter of the postmaster general of the Grand Duchy of Baden, who was a geologist of note and the possessor of the largest collection of minerals in Germany. Her brother, Alexander Braun, after whom her son was named, was a distinguished botanist and philosopher, and another brother, Max Braun, was an eminent mining engineer and geologist, and the director of the largest zinc mine in Europe. Thus we find that intellectual superiority was characteristic of both the paternal and maternal ancestors of Alexander Agassiz.

After the birth of her son, sorrow came upon the family, for the heavy expenses demanded by the publication of Louis Agassiz's numerous elaborate monographs with their hundreds of illustrations had exhausted not only their author's means, but had drained the resources of the entire community of Neuchâtel in so far as they could be enlisted for the cause of science. Thus in March, 1846, Louis Agassiz was forced to leave Neuchâtel, and to begin the long journey toward America, where he found a wider field for his great endeavors. Before his wife or children could follow him to his new home, she died in 1848 after a lingering illness.

Education

From 1847, after Alexander's father departed for America, until 1849, when he went to the Cambridge High School, Massachusetts, following the death of his mother, he lived at Freiburg in Breisgau, where he came under the influence of his uncle. Agassiz graduated from Harvard College in 1855, from the Lawrence Scientific School with a degree in engineering in 1857, and again from the Lawrence Scientific School with a degree in zoology in 1862.

Career

After a short career in the United States Coast Survey in 1859, Alexander Agassiz became his father’s assistant at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which he continued to serve for the rest of his life, chiefly as its director.

In 1866 Agassiz undertook, on behalf of himself and a brother-in-law, the management of the Calumet and Hecla copper mines in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. By 1869, although he had impaired his health, he had laid the basis for a fortune that he plowed into scientific research, both by gifts to Harvard and the museum and by freeing himself from a conventional career in either teaching or business. After 1873 his life consisted of a regular round of research in the tropics in the winter, summers at his laboratory near Newport, Rhode Island, and stays in Cambridge and Michigan each fall and spring. Although his fortune and his benefactions place him first among those late nineteenth-century captains of industry who supported science in the United States, he was distinguished as both a zoologist and an oceanographer.

Although usually reticent about large theoretical schemes, in 1860 Agassiz spoke in private letters in terms that were closer to the theories of his father about the geographical distribution of animals than to the ideas of Charles Darwin which were sweeping through the American scientific community (including among their adherents most of Louis Agassiz’s own students). By 1872, when Agassiz visited the British exploring ship Challenger at Halifax, Nova Scotia, he impressed its naturalists, including Sir John Murray, as holding views quite different from his father’s.

His work from 1860 to the late 1870’s was largely concerned with the study of zoology, beginning with the animals of the New England shore, especially the echinoderms, and culminating in his Revision of the Echini (1872-1874). He also worked up the echinoderms from the Challenger expedition.

In 1877 Agassiz’s interest began to shift to deep-sea dredging for abyssal fauna. Using his engineering background to good advantage and his wealth to support both operations and publications, he began with three cruises of the Coast Survey steamer Blake in the Caribbean. In 1891 he explored the deep water of the Pacific from the Galápagos Islands to the Gulf of California in the Fish Commission steamer Albatross. His aim in this period was to make a comparative study of marine fauna on both sides of the Isthmus of Panama. His interest from 1892 onward shifted strongly to the problem of the formation of coral atolls.

In 1893 and 1894 he explored the Bahama and Bermuda islands, in 1896 the Great Barrier Reef, in 1897 the Fijis, in 1898-1900 the central Pacific, and in 1900-1902 the Maldives. The publications of his later years were usually reports of the various voyages; a general work on coral reefs was never finished. Agassiz’s later work is as close to modern oceanography and marine zoology as his earlier work was to that of his father.

He died while crossing the Atlantic from England to America. He was cremated at Mount Auburn and was buried next to his wife and her parents at the Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory, Jamaica Plain, Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

Achievements

• Agassiz`s chief achievement was in his dedicated service as a president of the National Academy of Sciences, which since 1913 has awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal in his memory.
  
  Also, Agassiz served as a president of the copper mine near Lake Superior, at Calumet, Michigan, retaining that position until his death, by which time he had changed an initially unprofitable operation into the world’s foremost copper mine. Agassiz instituted modern machinery and safety devices, pension and accident funds for miners, and sanitary measures for surrounding communities. He donated large sums to the Harvard Museum, of which he was curator from 1874 to 1885, and to other institutions engaged in advancing the study of biology.
  
  Agassiz opened a private biological laboratory at Newport, Rhode Island, soon after closing his father’s experimental school of biology on Penikese Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. On a trip along the west coast of South America (1875), he discovered a coral reef 3,000 feet above sea level, an observation that appeared to contradict Charles Darwin’s theory of coral-reef formation, in which he postulated a rate of coral formation identical with the rise of sea level. He continued his marine and coral-reef studies for more than 25 years, making expeditions in various waters, including the Caribbean, the South Pacific, and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia.
  
  In 1866 he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, which at that time recruited itself from the active young workers of the country. He was president of the academy from 1901 to 1907, and its foreign secretary from 1891 to 1901 and from 1908 until his death in 1910.
  
  In 1878 he was awarded the Prix Serres by the Paris Academy, being the first foreigner to be thus honored, and in 1909 he received the Victoria research medal of the Royal Society of London. He received the honorary degree of LL.D. from Harvard in 1885 and from St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1901, Ph.D. from Bologna in 1888 and honorary Sc.D. from Cambridge in 1887.
  
  In 1898 he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor of France and in 1902 a Knight of the Order of Merit of Prussia. He was a foreign associate of the Academy of Science of the Institute of France, the only American associates of that time being Agassiz and Newcomb.

Works

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  • A Contribution Three Cruises Thalassography

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  • Seaside Studies in Natural History: Marine Animals of Massachusetts Bay

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  • The Coral Reefs of the Tropical Pacific

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  • Letters and recollections of Alexander Agassiz: with a sketch of his life and work

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  • Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz: With a Sketch of His Life and Work

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  • A contribution to American thalassography: Three cruises of the United States Coast and geodetic survey steameer

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  • On the Development of Some Pelagic Fish Eggs

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  • A Reconnoissance of the Bahamas and of the Elevated Reefs of Cuba in the Steam Yacht "Wild Duck"

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  • The Panamic deep sea Echini

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  • Revision of the Echini

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  • Echini. The genus Colobocentrotus

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  • A visit to the Bermudas in March, 1894

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  • The Islands and Coral Reefs of Fiji

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  • Revision of the Echini

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  • ... Hawaiian and Other Pacific Echini ...

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• Other Work

  • The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal

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Views

Questioning the universality of Darwin’s theory of atoll formation by subsidence, Agassiz used his knowledge of the Caribbean and Hawaiian islands as a basis of comparison.

Quotations: Using the embryological and paleontological approach of his father, Alexander Agassiz produced a masterly work that belonged to the era of Darwin, writing that it “is astonishing that so little use has been made of the positive data furnished by embryology in support of the evolution hypothesis.”

Membership

Agassiz was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1862. He was foreign honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, foreign member of the Royal, Linnean and Zoological societies of London, honorary member of the Eoyal Microscopical Society of London.

Connections

On November 15, 1860, he married Miss Anna Russell, daughter of George R. Russell, a leading merchant of Boston. He was the father of three sons – George R. Agassiz (1861–1951), Maximilian Agassiz (1866–1943) and Rodolphe Agassiz (1871–1933).

Father:

Louis Agassiz

Mother:

Cecile Braun

Stepmother:

Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz

Wife:

Anna Russell 1840–1873

Son:

George Russell Agassiz

Son:

Maximilian Agassiz (1866–1943)

Son:

Rodolphe Agassiz (1871–1933)

Uncle:

Alexander Braun

Sister:

Pauline Agassiz Shaw 1841–1917

Sister:

Ida Lee Agassiz Higginson 1837–1935

colleague:

Charles Wyville Thomson

He assisted Charles Wyville Thomson in the examination and classification of the collections of the 1872 Challenger Expedition.

References

• 1907 Print University Museum Harvard Zoological Botanical Alexander Agassiz LL D - Original Halftone Print
• Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral
• Agassiz, Alexander
• North American starfishes / by Alexander Agassiz.
• Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)
• Pioneer oceanographer: Alexander Agassiz,