Background
Louis François de Pourtalès was born on March 4, 1823, in Neuchâtel, Canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
1866
Louis Agassiz, 1807-1873, and Louis François de Pourtalès, 1823-1880.
Count Louis Francois de Pourtales (1824-1880).
naturalist oceanographer scientist Zoologist
Louis François de Pourtalès was born on March 4, 1823, in Neuchâtel, Canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
De Pourtalès was a pupil of Louis Agassiz, whom he accompanied in 1840 on glacial expeditions in the Alps and in 1847 to the United States.
Pourtales joined the United States Coast Survey in 1848, and he served as an assistant under three superintendents, making use of his education as an engineer by surveying and by heading the tidal division after 1854. The death of his father about 1870 brought Pourtales the title of count and financial independence. He resigned from the Coast Survey and returned to Massachusetts in 1873.
In his choice of a successor to direct the Museum of Comparative Zoology that he had founded at Harvard, Agassiz vacillated between Pourtales and his son Alexander. After his death, Pourtales became “keeper” and Alexander Agassiz, “curator.” Between them, they presided over one of the world’s greatest museums of natural history, with Pourtales responsible for much of the administrative work from 1873 until his brief, final illness in 1880. On his frequent trips home to Switzerland, Pourtales often visited England, where he was well known among naturalists for his deep-sea work.
Upon taking over the Coast Survey in 1844, Bache turned it from hydrography to oceanography by insisting on the preservation of the specimens brought up by the sounding lead. Because the lead brought up only small samples of the bottom, the first fruits of Bache’s new policy came in the study of sediments. Using the microscope, J. W. Bailey of West Point characterized the sediments obtained from Coast Survey vessels. When Bailey died in 1857, Pourtales, who had earlier studied the foraminifera, inherited the entire work. The chart that he prepared in 1870, from nine thousand samples, showed the distribution of bottom sediments along the coast between Cape Cod and Florida. Pourtales demonstrated that glaciers had extended offshore as far south as New Jersey, and his results have not been greatly improved upon by the research of the 1960’s.
In addition to studying sediments, Pourtales collected whatever marine fauna he could find, especially corals. At Bache’s invitation, Louis Agassiz had begun collecting in 1847 from Coast Survey vessels in shallow water off Massachusetts. In 1851 Agassiz accompanied Pourtales on a Coast Survey party to the Florida reefs, where Pourtalescollected sipunculidsand holothurians, on which he later reported. With this background in shallow-water forms, Pourtales was ready to extend his researches into deeper water when after the Civil War the Coast Survey resumed operations under Louis Agassiz’s close friend Benjamin Peirce. In the steamers Corwin (1867) and Bibb (1868, 1869), Pourtales extended the technology of dredging, hitherto confined to shallow water, to depths as great as 850 fathoms off the east coast of Florida. These pioneering dredgings - slightly earlier in time although not as deep as those of W. B. Carpenter and C. W. Thomson in Britain - led to the “opening of a new era in zoological and geological research".
Like his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, Pourtales was astonished by the abundance of living forms at depths previously believed to be largely uninhabited. He eagerly joined the planning for what was to be the great American dredging expedition: the cruise of the new Coast Survey steamer Hassler westward around South America. Louis Agassiz led the 1871-1872 expedition, with Pourtales in charge of dredging. Although Hassler's cruise failed - because of faulty equipment - to achieve its hoped-for results, it inspired Carpenter to promote in Great Britain the far more successful Challenger Expedition (1872 - 1876).
Pourtales’ researches, left unfinished at his death, are commemorated in the Pourtales Plateau, an area off southeast Florida rich in corals, and the sea urchin Pourtalesia, named in 1869 by Alexander Agassiz and found by H.M.S. Challenger to be one of nature’s most widely distributed genera.
Pourtales was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Pourtales was exceptionally modest and unassuming.
In 1848 Louis Francois de Pourtales married Marienne Elise Bachman of Boston.