Guyot, Arnold Henry

ge-o', Arnold Henry (1807-1884), a noted geographer. A native of Neuchatel, Switzerland. An associate of Agassiz. During the ten years he held a professorship in his native town Guyot made a study of Alpine glaciers. He taught that ice pours slowly down the ravines under the influence of gravity, not simply as mud would do, but that a constant freezing and thawing takes place within the body of ice. Guyot also investigated the country around the Central Alps, mapping the districts over which Alpine glaciers, formerly of greater extent, had carried boulders. In 1848 Guyot was invited to become a lecturer at Harvard College. These lectures were afterward published as Guyot's Earth and Man. Guyot was employed by the Massachusetts board of education to lecture on physical geography, and created a revolution in the teaching of that subject. He also prepared a physical geography, a series of descriptive geographies, and a set of wall maps for schoolrooms. In 1855 he became professor of physical geography and geology at Princeton. Professor Guyot organized a system of meteorological observations for the Smithsonian Institution, and was an honorary member of a large number of learned societies throughout the world. See Agassiz