Photograph of Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873) shown teaching at a blackboard.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
the University of Zurich, Main building by Karl Moser.
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
the University of Munich, The Lichthof (atrium).
Career
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, 1807 - 1873.
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, 1807 - 1873.
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
Agassiz became known as the "father of glaciology" because of his theory of ice ages. He began by studying the glaciers of Switzerland. He recognized that the signs of glacial activity could be found where glaciers were absent, and used this evidence to argue for the actions of past glaciers in the remote past.
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
Foto: Agassiz, Jean Louis Rodolphe (1807-1873).
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, Geologist 1864 (ca) Carte de visite. Wisconsin Historical Society Increase Allen Lapham: Papers, 1825-1930, carte-de-visite.
Gallery of Jean Agassiz
Louis Agassiz was one of the most influential scientists of the 19th century. The New York Public Library / Art Resource, New York.
Achievements
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, 28 May 1807 - 14 Dec 1873. Artist: Louis Mayer, 26 Nov 1869 - 1969.
Membership
Awards
the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society
In 1836, the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology.
More than a century on from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the toppled statue of Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz remains one of the most famous photographs of that devastating event.
Agassiz became known as the "father of glaciology" because of his theory of ice ages. He began by studying the glaciers of Switzerland. He recognized that the signs of glacial activity could be found where glaciers were absent, and used this evidence to argue for the actions of past glaciers in the remote past.
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, Geologist 1864 (ca) Carte de visite. Wisconsin Historical Society Increase Allen Lapham: Papers, 1825-1930, carte-de-visite.
Louis Agassiz is buried at Mount Auburn in Lot 2540 on Bellwort Avenue. He died in 1873, and the news sent ripples through Boston and Cambridge: Harvard stopped all activities on the day of his funeral, Boston’s newspapers were edged in black, and a long procession traveled from Appleton Chapel to Mount Auburn. The Republic of Switzerland sent an Alpine boulder from a glacial moraine to serve as Agassiz’s monument.
In 1836, the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology.
Connections
2nd wife: Elizabeth Cabot Cary
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the secon wife of Louis Agassiz.
Daughter: Pauline Agassiz Shaw 1841–1917
Pauline Agassiz Shaw, Louis Agassiz`s daughter.
Son: Alexander Agassiz
Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz, December 17, 1835 – March 27, 1910.
associate: Samuel George Morton
Samuel George Morton, 1799 – 1851, American physician and natural scientist.
associate: Alexander Dallas Bache
Alexander Dallas Bache (July 19, 1806 – February 17, 1867) was an American physicist, scientist, and surveyor who erected coastal fortifications and conducted a detailed survey to map the mideastern United States coastline.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
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(Methods of Study, were originally prepared from notes of ...)
Methods of Study, were originally prepared from notes of extemporaneous lectures, and first appeared in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. They still retain something of the familiarity induced by the personal relation of a lecturer to his audience, so different from the more distant one of the author to his reading public. They must indeed be considered as familiar talks on scientific subjects rather than as scientific papers.
(Excerpt from A Journey in Brazil Needed, always desiring ...)
Excerpt from A Journey in Brazil Needed, always desiring me to inform him should any additional expenses occur on closing up the affairs of the expedition. It seems to me that the good arising from the knowledge of such facts justifies me in speaking here of these generous deeds, accomplished so unostentatiously that they might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss-American biologist and geologist recognized as an innovative and prodigious scholar of Earth's natural history. Agassiz became known as the "father of glaciology" because of his theory of ice ages. He is also regarded for founding the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1860, and for being a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863.
Background
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born on May 28, 1807, in Motier (now part of Haut-Vully) in the canton of Fribourg, Switzerland, the son of Rodolphe and Rose Mayor Agassiz. His father was the Protestant pastor of the parish of Motier, on the north-eastern shore of the Lake of Morat (Murten See), and not far from the eastern extremity of the Lake of Neuchatel. Agassiz grew to manhood enjoying the prosperity and status of his family and the natural beauty of the Swiss cantons of Fribourg, Vaud, and Neuchâtel.
Education
Educated first at home, then spending four years at the gymnasium of Bienne, he completed his ele-mentary studies at the academy of Lausanne. The Agassiz and Mayor families were anxious to see Louis succeed in the world of commerce or medicine, but he triumphed over their opposition and entered the larger world of European scholarship and cosmopolitanism by attending the universities of Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich. After attending schools at Bienne, Lausanne, and Zurich, he attended the University of Heidelberg and later the University of Munich.
After earning his doctorate in philosophy at the universities of Munich and Erlangen in 1829 and publishing a monograph on the fishes of Brazil, it brought him to the attention of Baron Georges Cuvier. In 1830 he earned the doctor of medicine degree at Munich. After studying under Cuvier’s tutelage in Paris, Agassiz accepted a professorship at the newly established College of Neuchâtel in 1832. In the course of his study he came to accept the hypothesis that the erratic boulders scattered over the plain of Switzerland and on the sides of the Jura Mountains had been distributed by great masses of land-ice (glaciers) and not by water.
In 1846 Louis Agassiz accepted an invitation to lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston. In 1847 he accepted a professorship at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, where he continued to teach until his death.
Agassiz’s career had two distinct geographic and intellectual aspects. As a European, he published monographs on ichthyology, paleontology, and geology whose promise earned him the admiration of such established savants as Cuvier, Alexander von Humboldt, and Sir Charles Lyell. As an American, Agassiz made nature study popular and appealing, explored the American environment with great enthusiasm, and established lasting institutions of research and education. His dedication to science and culture won him the admiration of statesman and commoner alike, although his reputation among fellow scientists diminished with the passing of time.
Agassiz thought of himself primarily as a naturalist, generalizing about the entire range of organic creation. Nevertheless, it is the modern sciences of ichthyology, geology, and paleontology that bear the stamp of his contributions. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when the natural sciences were in transition from classical to evolutionary biology, Agassiz’s work and career were typical. He had an insatiable desire to record data: he described and analyzed material significant for the study of marine biology, freshwater fishes, embryology, and fossil fishes. In this last realm, his Poissons fossiles, written directly in the tradition of his mentor Cuvier, contained precise descriptions of more than 1,700 ancient species, together with illustrated reconstructions based on principles of comparative anatomy. This pioneer effort was a model of exactitude, providing future students with primary data relating zoology to geology and paleontology.
From 1835 to 1845, while still serving as a professor at Neuchâtel, Agassiz studied the glacial formations of Switzerland and compared them with the geology of England and central Europe. The resulting concept of the “Ice Age” was remarkable for its breadth of generalization and for the exacting field study represented. Agassiz held that in the immediately recent past there had been an era during which large land masses over much of northern Europe were covered with ice. With the onset of warming periods, the recession of the ice was responsible for upheaval and subsidence. The marks of glaciers could be discerned in the scratched and polished rocks as well as in the configurations of the earth in glaciated regions. Glacial movement was responsible for modern geological configurations, and could be traced in such areas as Switzerland.
Agassiz was not the first to observe the phenomena of glaciation, but he was innovative in the wide-ranging character of his research, his measurement of ice formations, and his elaboration of local geology into a theory explaining Continental natural history. Such events, now known to have been of greater cyclical duration than Agassiz asserted, were still sufficient to convince such naturalists as Darwin and Lyell that Pleistocene glaciation was a primary mechanism in causing the geographical distribution and consequent genetic relationship of flora and fauna otherwise inexplicably separated by land and water masses. But Agassiz could never accept such a conclusion.
Agassiz’s visit to the United States in 1846 was a notable success, for the brilliant young naturalist described his adventures and communicated his love of nature to lecture hall audiences in Boston and other eastern cities. He had also come to compare the natural history of the Old World with that of America, but this temporary purpose soon vanished in the adulation he received from all classes of Americans. Agassiz found the natural environment fascinating, and after accepting the Harvard professorship, he determined to explore it and interpret it to his new countrymen.
In 1855 he announced a grand plan for the publication of a monumental ten-volume study, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, that would depict the full scope of the American natural environment. Only four volumes appeared; and these, although magnificently illustrated, were valuable only for their descriptions of North American turtles. The work was at once too complicated for the general public and too descriptive for those naturalists increasingly interested in new theoretical conceptions identifiable with the work of Charles Darwin.
Agassiz was philosophically and scientifically unprepared to meet the challenge of the theory of evolution‘as it was propounded in 1859. During his early years in the United States he extended his glacial theory to North America, he explored large portions of the country, and conducted some potentially valuable research in marine biology. More than all these efforts, it was the collection of the raw data of nature that drove Agassiz ever onward, so that Harvard University became a center for natural history instruction and research. The capstone of such efforts was the establishment at Harvard College in 1859 of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, an institution made possible by private gifts and funds supplied by the state of Massachusetts. The museum always bore the impress of Agassiz’s conception of the relationship between graduate instruction, research, fieldwork, and publication, centered in an institution of higher learning and supported by private philanthropy and public funds.
It was inevitable that Agassiz became the leading American opponent of Darwin, but regrettable that his public activity left little time for reflection on the data he had collected or on alternate interpretations of its significance. Agassiz had become a public man in the fullest sense, but even had he devoted more time to intellectual labor, it is doubtful that he could have accepted an interpretation of nature that seemed to deny permanence and immaterialism. Some of his critiques of evolution were trenchant ones, but in the main his attacks were inconclusive efforts that failed to convince his scientific colleagues. Many of these appeared in popular journals, reflecting Agassiz’s conviction that this “error” had to be opposed with the full power of his public position.
While Agassiz’s opposition to evolution was inconsequential, the years from 1859 to his death were nevertheless a period of notable public accomplishment. He was able to obtain more than $600,000 in public and private support for the Harvard museum, and to convince fellow scientists to establish the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. This achievement, coupled with his earlier efforts to advise the federal government on the operations of the United States Coast Survey and the Smithsonian Institution, revealed Agassiz in the prime of his American influence and international prestige.
By 1873, despite Darwin, Agassiz’s name was synonymous with the study of natural history. It was fitting that in that last year of his life he established the Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island, off the Massachusetts coast, as a combined summer school and marine biological station. In testimony to Agassiz’s American influence, the faculty of the school was entirely composed of his former students. The Poissons fossiles and Études sur les glaciers were high points of Agassiz’s career in Europe; in America, the life and work of such students as William James, David Starr Jordan, Alexander Agassiz, Frederick Ward Putnam, and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler exemplify his role and cultural significance.
In 1873, shortly after an expedition through the Strait of Magellan, Agassiz died of a cerebral hemorrhage and was buried at Mount Auburn in Lot 2540 on Bellwort Avenue.
Agassiz never identified with a sectarian religious persuasion. He did embrace the Protestant pietism of his minister father, but was more fundamentally devoted to an idealistic romanticism that saw the power of the Creator exemplified in all flora and fauna. Agassiz was in modern terms a creationist who believed nature had order because God created it directly. According to Agassiz, genera and species were ideas in the mind of God; their existence in God's mind prior to their physical creation meant that God could create humans as one species yet in several distinct and geographically separate acts of creation.
Politics
At a certain extent Agassiz could be called an Abolitionist, since he never supported slavery, but he claimed that his views on polygenism had nothing to do with politics.
Views
Despite being a ground-breaking zoologist and glaciologist – he was a key promoter of the Ice Age theory – two words explain Agassiz’s relative absence from history books: Darwin and racism. He refused to admit evolutionary theory and believed blacks and whites had different origins.
Agassiz never viewed his work in paleoichthyology as providing a framework for conceptions of natural history related to the development of lower forms into higher ones. He insisted that ancient and modern species were permanent representations of a divine idea, and bore no genetic relationship to each other. While employing techniques of close empirical study learned from such teachers as Cuvier and Ignaz Dollinger, Agassiz affirmed a view of the world above and beyond experience. In this sense, he reflected the teaching of Lorenz Oken and Friedrich Schelling. These diverse influences in Agassiz’s intellectual history make it impossible to separate his contributions to exact science from his philosophy of nature. He worked in two divergent traditions, and his efforts reflected the virtues and deficiencies of each. This is why evolutionists found Agassiz so mystifying an opponent and why the Swiss naturalist found their views to be mere restatements of ideas absorbed and partly rejected in his youth. These divergent qualities were reflected in Agassiz’s geological investigations.
Agassiz interpreted glaciation in metaphysical terms. To him, the Deity had been responsible for the Ice Age, a catastrophe that provided a permanent physical barrier separating the species of the past from those of the present era. There were as many as twenty separate creations in the history of the earth, each distinguished by animal and plant forms bearing no relationship to present types. At best, paleontology could only provide a glimpse of those “prophetic types” that suggested the course of future development, while those forms that remained unchanged over time were evidence of the wisdom of the Creator in inspiring perfect creatures from the beginning. Agassiz extended his conception of natural history to include mankind, asserting that men, like other animals, were of distinct types or species and were marked by different physical and intellectual traits. In the United States of the pre-Civil War years, such ideas provided convenient rationalizations for defenders of the slave system.
Agassiz was also an opponent of miscegenation. At a lecture at the Charleston Literary Club in South Carolina in 1847, Agassiz announced that blacks constituted a separate species. In a letter to American abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe in 1863, Agassiz stated that sexual relations between blacks and whites were “immoral” and “destructive to the social equality.” Coming from a naturalist of Agassiz’s eminence, such views emboldened the resolve of many pro-slavery white Americans, especially in the South.
Quotations:
According to Blowers, Agassiz believed God made all men equal:
"Those intellectual and moral qualities which are so eminently developed in civilized society, but which equally exist in the natural dispositions of all human races, constituting the higher unity among men, making them all equal before God. "
"A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory. "
"A man cannot be professor of zoölogy on one day and of chemistry on the next, and do good work in both. As in a concert all are musicians,—one plays one instrument, and one another, but none all in perfection."
"A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something."
"Absorbed in the special investigation, I paid no heed to the edifice which was meanwhile unconsciously building itself up. Having however completed the comparison of the fossil species in Paris, I wanted, for the sake of an easy revision of the same, to make a list according to their succession in geological formations, with a view of determining the characteristics more exactly and bringing them by their enumeration into bolder relief. What was my joy and surprise to find that the simplest enumeration of the fossil fishes according to their geological succession was also a complete statement of the natural relations of the families among themselves; that one might therefore read the genetic development of the whole class in the history of creation, the representation of the genera and species in the several families being therein determined; in one word, that the genetic succession of the fishes corresponds perfectly with their zoological classification, and with just that classification proposed by me."
"America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the Far West."{
"Embryology furnishes … the best measure of the true affinities existing between animals."
"Every great scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it."
"I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,—this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature."
"I sometimes hear preachers speak of the sad condition of men who live without God in the world, but a scientist who lives without God in the world seems to me worse off than ordinary men."
"I now never make the preparations for penetrating into some small province of nature hitherto undiscovered without breathing a prayer to the Being who hides His secrets from me only to allure me graciously on to the unfolding of them. "
"In Europe I have been accused of taking my scientific ideas from the Church. In America I have been called a heretic, because I will not let my church-going friends pat me on the head."
"In the real changes which animals undergo during their embryonic growth, in those external transformations as well as in those structural modifications within the body, we have a natural scale to measure the degree or the gradation of those full grown animals which corresponds in their external form and in their structure, to those various degrees in the metamorphoses of animals, as illustrated by embryonic changes, a real foundation for zoological classification."
"In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence. The mind’s activity that is maintained by the debates about these works, is probably the source of the greatest joys given to man to experience on Earth."
"It is better to have a few forms well known than to teach a little about many hundred species. Better a dozen specimens thoroughly studied as the result of the first year’s work, than to have two thousand dollars’ worth of shells and corals bought from a curiosity-shop. The dozen animals would be your own."
"It must be for truth’s sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature. The application of science to the useful arts requires other abilities, other qualities, other tools than his; and therefore I say that the man of science who follows his studies into their practical application is false to his calling. The practical man stands ever ready to take up the work where the scientific man leaves it, and adapt it to the material wants and uses of daily life."
"Lay aside all conceit. Learn to read the book of Nature for yourself. Those who have succeeded best have followed for years some slim thread which once in a while has broadened out and disclosed some treasure worth a life-long search."
"One naturally asks, what was the use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth? We have our answer in the fertile soil which spreads over the temperate regions of the globe. The glacier was God’s great plough."
"Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this double allegiance."
"Select such subjects that your pupils cannot walk out without seeing them. Train your pupils to be observers, and have them provided with the specimens about which you speak. If you can find nothing better, take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen and examine it as you talk. "
"The combination in time and space of all these thoughtful conceptions [of Nature] exhibits not only thought, it shows also premeditation, power, wisdom, greatness, prescience, omniscience, providence. In one word, all these facts in their natural connection proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and love; and Natural History must in good time become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe…."
"The office of science is not to record possibilities; but to ascertain what nature does ... As far as Darwinism deals with mere arguments of possibilities or even probabilities, without a basis of fact, it departs from the true scientific method and injures science, as most of the devotees of the new ism have already done."
"The study of Nature is intercourse with the highest mind. You should never trifle with Nature. At her lowest her works are the works of the highest powers, the highest something in the universe, in whichever way we look at it… This is the charm of Study from Nature itself; she brings us back to absolute truth wherever we wander."
"The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts, to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge."
"The world is the geologist’s great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand."
"When chemists have brought their knowledge out of their special laboratories into the laboratory of the world, where chemical combinations are and have been through all time going on in such vast proportions,—when physicists study the laws of moisture, of clouds and storms, in past periods as well as in the present,—when, in short, geologists and zoologists are chemists and physicists, and vice versa,—then we shall learn more of the changes the world has undergone than is possible now that they are separately studied."
"You cannot do without one specialty. You must have some base-line to measure the work and attainments of others. For a general view of the subject, study the history of the sciences. Broad knowledge of all Nature has been the possession of no naturalist except Humboldt, and general relations constituted his specialty."
"[T]he phenomena of animal life correspond to one another, whether we compare their rank as determined by structural complication with the phases of their growth, or with their succession in past geological ages; whether we compare this succession with their relative growth, or all these different relations with each other and with the geographical distribution of animals upon the earth. The same series everywhere!"
Membership
In 1838 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. Afterall, he was a member of some 42 science organizations, he helped to found a society for the pursuit of the natural sciences at Neuchâtel.
Personality
His robust attitude toward life and nature study was a perpetual passion that tolerated no opposition to plans he deemed vital. Agassiz demanded unquestioning loyalty, and repaid such dedication by deep love and devotion.
Physical Characteristics:
His exceptionally strong constitution sustained Agassiz on journeys of exploration through central Europe, the Swiss Alps, the eastern United States and the trans-Mississippi West, and South America.
Quotes from others about the person
"The beauty of his better self lives on
In minds he touched with fire, in many an eye
He trained to Truth’s exact severity;
He was a teacher: why be grieved for him
Whose living word still stimulates the air?" — James Russell Lowell.
"I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor Agassiz, that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it before." — Sir Charles Lyell.
"[Concerning the former belief that there were no genetic connections among species:] This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz." — Asa Gray.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Agassiz was influenced by philosophical idealism and the scientific work of Georges Cuvier, Lorenz Oken, and Friedrich Schelling.
Connections
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz married Cécile Braun in 1833, the sister of his Heidelberg classmate Alexander Braun. She died in 1847, and Agassiz’s decision to make the United States his permanent home-despite attractive offers to return to Europewas influenced by his love for and marriage to Elizabeth Cabot Cary. From 1850 until 1873 she raised Agassiz’s three children by his first wife and acted as a constant companion in the writing, exploration, and interpretation of natural history.