Louis Agassiz

American naturalist

• Born: May 28, 1807
• Birthplace: Môtier-en-Vuly, Switzerland
• Died: December 14, 1873
• Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Agassiz created an awareness of the importance of the study of natural history in the United States with his founding of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He was a pioneer in making science an integral part of the curriculum in American higher education and is particularly known for his work on glaciers.

Early Life

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (ah-gah-see) was one of four children of a Protestant Swiss clergyman. At the age of ten, he was sent to school at Bienne, where he spent much of his time observing freshwater fish, which fascinated him. In 1822, he entered the Academy of Lausanne. Out of deference to his parents, after he graduated, he enrolled in the school of medicine at the University of Zurich. After two years of studies in medicine, he enrolled in the University of Heidelberg, where he developed a special interest in natural history. The following year, he transferred to the University of Munich to study under Ignaz von Döllinger, a pioneer embryologist whom Agassiz credited as the source of his scientific training.

In 1829, he received a doctorate in philosophy at Erlanger and returned to Munich to complete his studies in medicine. The following year, he received a doctorate in medicine and thereafter never examined a patient; his mind was set on pursuing studies in ichthyology, paleontology, and glacial geology.

While Agassiz was enrolled in Munich, Lorenz Oken, one of his professors, presented a paper on Agassiz’s discovery of a new species of carp. In 1829, Agassiz published his first book on this species of Brazilian fish based on his study of a collection of specimens from the Amazon brought to Munich in 1821 by J. B. Spix and K. F. Philip von Martius. The book was written with such beauty and clarity that it was soon evident that Agassiz would become not only a man of science but also a man of letters.

Agassiz married Cecile Braun, sister of the eminent botanist Alexander Braun. There were three children born to the union, a son and two daughters. Cecile was a natural history artist whose drawings of fossil and freshwater fish forms appeared in several of Agassiz’s books. She died of tuberculosis in 1848.

Agassiz was a large, robust man, slightly above medium height, who had keen brown eyes that could light up with enthusiasm. He had chestnut brown hair that gradually thinned with age but retained its color into his declining years.

Life’s Work

The professional life of Agassiz is clearly divided into two chapters: his work as a research scientist in Europe, in the course of which he made significant advances in the fields of ichthyology and glacial geology, and his teaching career in the United States, during which he dedicated himself to making science an integral and respected part of the curriculum of higher education in his adopted country.

Upon completion of his formal schooling, Agassiz went to Paris to continue his studies in medicine. While there, he spent much of his time at the museum of natural history at the Jardin des Plantes, where he met Georges Cuvier, the master of comparative anatomy. The aging Cuvier willingly turned over much of his unfinished work to the young naturalist to complete. Agassiz also met the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who in 1832 secured for him an appointment as professor in natural history at the University of Neuchâtel.

While at Neuchâtel, Agassiz formed a natural history society and took scientists on excursions into the Alps to study and observe flora and fauna. Agassiz turned Neuchâtel into a research center, and over the course of fifteen years he published more than two hundred works, including twenty substantial volumes illustrated with more than two thousand plates. Before Agassiz began his research, only eight generic types of fossil fish had been named in formal publications. Agassiz identified 340 new genera, many of them in his books History of the Fresh Water Fishes of Central Europe (1839-1842) and Monograph on the Fossil Fishes of the Old Red or Devonian of the British Isles and Russia (1844-1845).

While at Neuchâtel, Agassiz’s attention was drawn to the nearby glacier of the great median moraine of the lower Aar valley, and this sent his scientific investigations in a new direction, that of glacial geology. He concluded from his observations that gravity controls glacial movements and that glaciers travel faster in the middle and at the surface, disproving the commonly held theory that glaciers are pushed along by water freezing underneath. He published his findings in Études sur les glaciers (1840; studies on glaciers) and Systèmes glaciaires (1846; glacial systems). Agassiz came to accept Karl Schimper’s “ice age” thesis and added that Europe had been subjected once to a period of extreme cold from the North Pole to the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas in a widespread Pleistocene ice age. He studied earth surfaces all over Europe and concluded that drift material and polished and striated boulders gave evidence of earlier glacial movements.

A gift from the king of Prussia in 1846 enabled Agassiz to pursue his work in the United States. Sir Charles Lyell had arranged for him to participate in a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston. Agassiz’s life took another turn. His intense research gave way to teaching and campaigning on behalf of natural history as a legitimate academic endeavor.

Agassiz continued to write of his discoveries with verbal precision and lucid description. He could devote fifty pages of unmatched prose describing the interior of an egg. He set about to produce a twelve-volume series entitled Contributions to the Natural History of the United States . More than twenty-five hundred advance subscriptions were taken, but only four volumes were ever produced (1857-1862). These four volumes represented a triumph of thought and scholarship and contributed to the nature-consciousness of the American public.

In 1848, Agassiz accepted the chair of natural history of the new Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, and the same year he published his popular Principles of Zoology . When he visited Washington, D.C., he was disappointed to find so little scientific activity in the nation’s capital. At the time, the Smithsonian Institution had not begun to function. Agassiz was later made a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, and the institution’s natural history division was developed.

In 1850, Agassiz married Elizabeth Cary, and the following year he accepted a teaching appointment at the Medical College of Charleston, South Carolina. After two years, he resigned because he found the climate unsuitable and returned to Harvard. He and his wife opened a school for young women in Cambridge that became the precursor of Radcliffe College.

Agassiz was quite disappointed with Harvard’s science department and claimed that the chemistry laboratory at Cambridge High School was better equipped; he often did his work there. In 1859, Agassiz founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and helped to create a new era in American higher education. He emphasized advanced and original works as factors in mental training and stressed the direct, hands-on study of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson complained that something ought to be done to check this rush toward natural history at Harvard. Agassiz countered that the rest of the curriculum should be brought up to the standards he had set for the zoology laboratories. Agassiz found a kindred soul in Henry David Thoreau and often visited Walden Pond. At a dinner hosted by Emerson, Thoreau and Agassiz once talked of mating turtles, to the disgust of Emerson. From Walden, Thoreau sent Agassiz varieties of fish, turtles, and snakes, and was paid handsomely for them.

The same year that Agassiz opened the museum at Harvard, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The theory of evolution did not begin with Darwin, and Agassiz was thoroughly acquainted with the works of Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and their ideas of the gradual, continuous progress of species that contributed to the theory of evolution.

Much of the knowledge of embryology that is integral to Darwin’s theory was originally discovered by Agassiz. Agassiz once admitted that he had been on the verge of anticipating Darwinism when he found that the highest fishes were those that came first, and therefore he rejected the theory. Sharks, one of the most primitive species, had the largest brains and the most specialized teeth and muscular systems. Two years before Darwin’s theory was published, Agassiz wrote “An Essay on Classification,” in which he asserted that the plan of creation was the “free conception” of an all-powerful intelligence in accordance with a predetermined pattern for each of the species, which, he argued, were destined to remain changeless.

Agassiz became Darwin’s most formidable opponent in the United States. His studies of fossils led him to conclude that the changes that animals undergo during their embryonic growth coincide with the order of succession of the fossils of the same type in past geological ages. He believed that all species had been immutable since their creation. From time to time, the Creator may have annihilated old species and created new ones. His exhibits at the Harvard museum were intended to reflect the permanence of the species.

Agassiz regarded himself as the “librarian of the works of God,” but he was not a theologian and gave no support to those ministers who parroted his responses to Darwin. He claimed that in Europe he was accused of deriving his scientific ideas from the church and in the United States he was regarded as an infidel because he would not let churchmen pat him on the head. Agassiz believed that there was a creator and even went so far as to posit a multiple creation theory. He claimed that black people were created separately and were a different species from whites, an argument that gave great comfort to the defenders of slavery in the South.

Only a few American scientists, such as his Harvard colleague Asa Gray, dared to take open issue with the erudite and popular Agassiz before his death. Gray argued that the species had originated in a single creative act and that their variations were the result of causes such as climate, geographical isolation, and the phenomena described by the same glacial theory that Agassiz had done so much to establish.

Agassiz became an American citizen in 1861 and continued his opposition to Darwinism. He fought a losing battle for fifteen years with the Darwinists and went to his grave denying the reality of evolution. His last article, published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly (1874), was entitled “Evolution and the Permanence of Type.”

Agassiz was appointed a visiting professor at Cornell in 1868, but the following year he suffered a stroke. Although this slowed him considerably, he continued his strenuous schedule of speaking and writing. In 1872, he sailed on board a coastal survey ship from Boston around the horn to San Francisco. The trip was disappointing, because Agassiz was unable to make the scientific progress he had hoped on the voyage. In 1873, John Anderson of New York deeded the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay off the coast of Massachusetts and gave fifty thousand dollars to help Agassiz create a summer school for science teachers. The Anderson School of Natural History became the forerunner of the Woods Hole Biological Institute.

Significance

Louis Agassiz was the man who made the United States nature-conscious. He was a major figure in American nineteenth century culture, in the fields of both literature and science. He assumed that the organization of nature was everyone’s concern and that each community should collect and identify the elements of its own zoology and botany.

Agassiz would appear to have been the most likely to champion the theory of evolution, particularly with his vast knowledge of paleontology and embryology. Instead, he chose to do battle with the evolutionists and to maintain stoutly his belief in the unchanging forms of created species. In his Methods of Study in Natural History (1863), Agassiz wrote:

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.

Agassiz had done much more than he modestly claimed. In the age of Chautauqua speakers, he was a spellbinder. Above all, he was a teacher who was not only a dedicated scholar but also a friend to his students. With all of his talents as lecturer and author, he might have been a wealthy man, but he remained in debt all of his life and even mortgaged his house to support the museum at Harvard.

Agassiz wished above all to be remembered as a teacher. After he died in Cambridge in December, 1873, an unshaped boulder brought from the glacier of the Aar marked his grave at Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. On it were carved the words he had requested: “Agassiz the Teacher.”

Bibliography

Agassiz, Louis. Studies on Glaciers: Preceded by the Discourses of Neuchatel. Translated and edited by Albert V. Carozzi. New York: Hafner Press, 1967. Carozzi’s introduction is excellent. Included is a reprint of the atlas that Agassiz used.

Baird, Spencer Fullerton. Correspondence Between Spencer Fullerton Baird and Louis Agassiz: Two Pioneer American Naturalists. Edited by Elmer Charles Herber. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1964. Baird was the editor of the papers of the Smithsonian Institution and carried on extensive correspondence with Agassiz. The letters contained the latest news on discoveries in natural history.

Bolles, Edmund Blair. The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999. Describes how interactions between Agassiz, geologist Sir Charles Lyell, and poet Elisha Kent Kane created public acceptance for the idea of an ice age.

Davenport, Guy, ed. The Intelligence of Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. The foreword by Alfred Romer is an excellent overview of the work of Agassiz. Davenport has selected Agassiz’s most incisive works and introduces each with a skill that makes this slim volume invaluable.

Fry, C. George, and Jon Paul Fry. Congregationalists and Evolution: Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989. Compares the lives and philosophies of Agassiz and his Harvard colleague, botanist Asa Gray, focusing on their dispute over Darwin’s theory of evolution and their membership in the Congregationalist Church.

Lurie, Edward. Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. A persuasive interpretation of Agassiz and an exhaustive study of his papers. Lurie acknowledges Agassiz’s weaknesses and pictures a genius with faults.

Marcou, Jules. Life, Letters, and Works of Louis Agassiz. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1896. Valuable for range and accuracy of details, including an annotated list of American and European publications concerning Agassiz. Also included is a complete catalog of his 425 scientific papers.

Tharp, Louise Hall. Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. An account of the personal lives of Agassiz and his second wife, Elizabeth. An interesting story that relates something of the background of late nineteenth century Boston society.

Winsor, Mary P. Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Recounts the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, focusing on the dispute between Agassiz and his son, Alexander, over Darwin’s theory of evolution.