Agassiz, Louis
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ag'a-see, Louis (1807-1873), an eminent scientist. Born at Neuchatel, Switzerland, May 28, 1807. Died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 14, 1873. He was the son of a Protestant minister. He studied medicine at Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich, and became professor of natural history at Neuchatel in 1832. He was acquainted with Cuvier and Humboldt. His first published work was a description of fishes brought from Brazil, 1831. He increased his reputation by a five volume work in French, 1842, entitled Researches on Fossil Fishes, in which he made several improvements in the classification of fishes. With Guyot he studied the glaciers of the Alps. In 1848 Agassiz accepted the chair of zoology and geology at Harvard. He rejected the evolutionary theory of the origin of animals. In 1868 Agassiz was made a non-resident professor of natural history at Cornell University . Although Agassiz's opinions are not always accepted by scientists, he is conceded by all to have been a great teacher and a wonderful man. He gave the study of natural history a tremendous impulse in this country. He was devoted to field work and inspired his students with a love of nature. He established the first marine biological laboratory in this country, on the island of Penekese, south-west of Massachusetts. He lies buried near the graves of Lowell and Longfellow in Mount Auburn cemetery, Cambridge. A boulder from the Aar glacier in Switzerland marks his resting place. The following lines are from a poem read by Longfellow at a dinner given Professor Agassiz on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday: 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.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 note that "Agassiz's opinions are not always accepted by scientists" was a polite way of saying he had lost his central argument: his refusal of Darwin was already a minority view when he died in 1873, and common descent is now the foundation of biology. His other great idea won outright — the glacial theory he first argued in the 1830s is standard science, with the Pleistocene now understood as a long series of ice ages driven by cyclical shifts in Earth's orbit. What the 1910 account leaves out is the part that has damaged his reputation most: his polygenist writings, which held human races to be separately created, made him a scientific authority for American racism, and in 2002 Cambridge renamed its Agassiz School for the Black educator Maria Baldwin. The Penikese laboratory of 1873 closed within two years, but its idea survives in the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.
Written for this edition, 2026.