Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz, December 17, 1835 – March 27, 1910.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Alexander Agassiz
Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Career
Gallery of Alexander Agassiz
Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz, December 17, 1835 – March 27, 1910.
Gallery of Alexander Agassiz
1878, hand colored wood engraving showing the summer retreat of Professor Alexander Agassiz, at Castle Hill, near Newport. Engraving shows he and his friends examining scientific specimens in the Main Hall of the Laboratory. Featured in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
Gallery of Alexander Agassiz
1878, hand colored wood engravings titled, "Rhode Island - The Summer Retreat of Professor Alexander Agassiz, at Castle Hill, Near Newport."
Gallery of Alexander Agassiz
Theodore Lyman, Alexander Agassiz, and Jacques Burkhardt (Left to right). Date: ca. 1860.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Officer of the Legion of Honor
National Order of the Legion of Honour, France, 5th Republic (Officer).
Knight of the Order of Merit
The Order of Merit of the Prussian Crown was given to Agassiz in 1902.
1878, hand colored wood engraving showing the summer retreat of Professor Alexander Agassiz, at Castle Hill, near Newport. Engraving shows he and his friends examining scientific specimens in the Main Hall of the Laboratory. Featured in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
Interior of the Agassiz Laboratory at Newport. From the Annual report of the Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology for Harvard for 1891-92. Kindness of Dr. Samuel Henshaw.
The Agassiz Laboratory at Newport, Rhode Island. From the Annual Reort of the Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard for 1891-92. Kindness of Dr. Samuel Henshaw.
Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz was an American scientist and engineer. He is noted for his service as a president of the National Academy of Sciences, and as one of the most prominent American scientists in the field of zoology and oceanography at the beginning of the 20th century.
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.
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.
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).