Louis Agassiz

Louis Agassiz

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873). (pronounced AGG-uh-see). Full name: Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. Swiss-born American zoologist, geologist, and paleontologist, with a special expertise in ichthyology. Founder and director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, he was one of the most famous scientists of his day.

Agassiz was a student of Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt. The latter obtained for him a professorship at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. There, Agassiz completed his monumental, exquisitely illustrated Recherches sur les poissons fossiles, a book that brought together much of what was then known about fossil fishes and that did much to stimulate future research into extinct life of all kinds. During his years at Neuchâtel, he also completed the Nomenclator Zoologicus (1842-1846), a vast annotated list of all generic names that had been used in zoological nomenclature from the time of Linnaeus.

Raised in the Swiss Alps, his study of glacial erratics and other traces of past glaciation led him to propose the occurrence of past ice ages. On July 24, 1837, Agassiz stunned attendees of the annual meeting of the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences by passionately arguing for this idea. In his Études sur les glaciers ("Glacier Studies"), he asserted that all of central Europe had once been buried beneath a massive sheet of ice. What he called the Eiszeit (German for Ice Age) is now called the Pleistocene.

Having traveled to the United States in 1846 to lecture and study the natural history of North America, he was offered a professorship at Harvard and and decided to settle in Boston. Agassiz became one of the first American biologists of international standing. Through his Harvard years of teaching future prominent scientists, Agassiz had perhaps the greatest influence of any single individual in the 19th century on the future course of American zoology and geology. But he is now remembered primarily for his ice age theories and for his opposition to the theory of natural selection.

In recent literature Agassiz has been criticized for his racist attitudes, but one must remember that racism was more the rule than the exception in the 19th century (in fact, it seems that the amiable Alfred Wallace was the only prominent naturalist of that era that did not express such views). Even Darwin, who is widely revered by biologists today, expressed opinions that would be utterly reprehensible if judged by modern standards. For example, in The Descent of Man (1871, vol. 1, p. 201), he makes the now outrageous suggestion that blacks are somehow intermediate between civilized human beings and apes:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break [i.e., between human beings and other forms of life] will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."

There seems, then, to be no reason to single out Louis Agassiz for reproach in this regard.

Additional notes:

--Agassiz was the first to realize that the immense prehistoric Lake Agassiz was created by glaciers, hence its name.

--The following is an excerpt from Longfellow's poem, The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz:

      And Nature, the old nurse, took
        The child upon her knee,
      Saying: 'Here is a story-book
        Thy Father has written for thee.'

      'Come, wander with me,' she said,
        'Into regions yet untrod;
      And read what is still unread
        In the manuscripts of God.'

      And he wandered away and away
        With Nature, the dear old nurse,
      Who sang to him night and day
        The rhymes of the universe.