Louis Agassiz

Prof. Dr. phil. et med. Louis Agassiz

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (b. 28 May 1807 in Môtier; d. 14 December 1873 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a Swiss-American biologist and geologist recognized as an innovative and prodigious scholar of Earth's natural history. Agassiz is known for his regimen of observational data gathering and analysis. He made vast institutional and scientific contributions to zoology, geology, and related areas. His engagement for the Lowell Institute lectures precipitated the establishment of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University in 1847 with him as its head. Harvard appointed him professor of zoology and geology, and he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology there in 1859 serving as the museum's first director until his death in 1873. During his tenure at Harvard, he was, among many other things, an early student of the effect of the last Ice Age on North America.

Life

Louis Agassiz was born in Môtier (now part of Haut-Vully) in the canton of Fribourg, Switzerland. Educated first at home, then spending four years of secondary school in Bienne, he completed his elementary studies in Lausanne. Having adopted medicine as his profession, he studied natural sciences successively at the universities of Zürich, Heidelberg and Munich; while there he extended his knowledge of natural history, especially of botany.

In 1829, he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Erlangen (German Confederation), and in 1830 that of doctor of medicine at Munich (Kingdom of Bavaria). Moving to Paris, he fell under the tutelage of Alexander von Humboldt and Georges Cuvier, who launched him on his careers of geology and zoology respectively. Previously he had not paid special attention to the study of ichthyology, but it soon became the great focus of his life's work.

After Cuvier's death, Agassiz had a professorship in natural history created especially for him in 1832–1846 at the Gymnasium (from 1838 also at the academy) Neuenburg (Neuchâtel). In 1837, Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that Earth had been subject to a past ice age. In the same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

At the same time, he expanded the collection of the Neuchâtel Natural History Museum. Through the extensive publications in self-publishing, Agassiz received from the King of Prussia, thanks to the mediation of Alexander von Humboldt, the task to compare the faunas of Europe and the New World. In 1846–47, he undertook a lecture tour in America.

Prior to this de Saussure, Venetz, Jean de Charpentier, Karl Friedrich Schimper and others had made the glaciers of the Alps the subjects of special study, and Charpentier as well as Schimper had even arrived at the conclusion that the erratic blocks of alpine rocks scattered over the slopes and summits of the Jura Mountains had been moved there by glaciers. The question having attracted the attention of Agassiz, he not only discussed it with Charpentier and Schimper and made successive journeys to the alpine regions in company with them, but he had a hut constructed upon one of the Aar Glaciers, which for a time he made his home, in order to investigate the structure and movements of the ice. These labours resulted, in 1840, in the publication of his work in two volumes entitled Etudes sur les glaciers ("Study on Glaciers"). In it he discussed the movements of the glaciers, their moraines, their influence in grooving and rounding the rocks over which they travelled, and in producing the striations and roches moutonnees seen in Alpine-style landscapes. He not only accepted Charpentier's and Schimper's idea that some of the alpine glaciers had extended across the wide plains and valleys drained by the Aar and the Rhône, but he went still farther. He concluded that, in the relatively recent past, Switzerland had been another Greenland; that instead of a few glaciers stretching across the areas referred to, one vast sheet of ice, originating in the higher Alps, had extended over the entire valley of northwestern Switzerland until it reached the southern slopes of the Jura, which, though they checked and deflected its further extension, did not prevent the ice from reaching in many places the summit of the range. The publication of this work gave a fresh impetus to the study of glacial phenomena in all parts of the world.

Thus familiarized with the phenomena associated with the movements of recent glaciers, Agassiz was prepared for a discovery which he made in 1840, in conjunction with William Buckland. The two visited the mountains of Scotland together, and found in different locations clear evidence of ancient glacial action. The discovery was announced to the Geological Society of London in successive communications. The mountainous districts of England, Wales, and Ireland were also considered to constitute centres for the dispersion of glacial debris; and Agassiz remarked "that great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface, etc."

After Agassiz came to the United States, he became a prolific writer in what has been later termed the genre of scientific racism. Agassiz was specifically a believer and advocate in polygenism, that races came from separate origins (specifically separate creations), were endowed with unequal attributes, and could be classified into specific climatic zones, in the same way he felt other animals and plants could be classified.

These included Western American Temperate (the indigenous peoples west of the Rockies); Eastern American Temperate (east of the Rockies); Tropical Asiatic (south of the Himalayas); Temperate Asiatic (east of the Urals and north of the Himalayas); South American Temperate (South America); New Holland (Australia); Arctic (Alaska and Arctic Canada); Cape of Good Hope (South Africa); and American Tropical (Central America and the West Indies).

Agassiz denied that species originated in single pairs, whether at a single location or at many. He argued instead that multiple individuals in each species were created at the same time and then distributed throughout the continents where God meant for them to dwell. His lectures on polygenism were popular among the slaveholders in the South; for many this opinion legitimized the belief in a lower standard of the Negro. Interestingly, his stance in this case was considered to be quite radical in its time, because it went against the more orthodox and standard reading of the Bible in his time which implied all human stock descended from a single couple (Adam and Eve), and in his defense Agassiz often used what now sounds like a very "modern" argument about the need for independence between science and religion; though Agassiz, unlike many polygeneticists, maintained his religious beliefs and was not anti-Biblical in general.

Stephen Jay Gould has argued that Agassiz's theories sprang from an initial revulsion in his encounters with African-Americans upon moving to the United States. Agassiz's racism was by no means unique for his time or context, though his reading of it into a formalized and scientific context gave it a sense of legitimacy, and allowed it to be easily exported to other contexts.

In the context of ethnology and anthropology of the mid-19th century, Agassiz's polygenetic views became explicitly seen as opposing Darwin's views on race, which sought to show the common origin of all human races and the superficiality of racial differences. Darwin's second book on evolution, The Descent of Man, features extensive argumentation addressing the single origin of the races, at times explicitly opposing Agassiz's theories.

On 30 November 1860, Agassiz's daughter Pauline was married to Quincy Adams Shaw (1825–1908), a wealthy Boston merchant and later benefactor to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Quincy Adams Shaw and his brother-in-law Henry Higginson became major investors in the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, and Shaw was the first president of the company and retained that position until 1871, when Agassiz's son Alexander Agassiz took over. In 1863, Agassiz's daughter Ida married Henry Lee Higginson, later to be founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and benefactor to Harvard University and other schools.

In the last years of his life, Agassiz worked to establish a permanent school where zoological science could be pursued amid the living subjects of its study. In 1873, a private philanthropist (John Anderson) gave Agassiz the island of Penikese, in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts (south of New Bedford), and presented him with $50,000 to permanently endow it as a practical school of natural science, especially devoted to the study of marine zoology. The John Anderson school collapsed soon after Agassiz's death, but is considered a precursor of the Marine Biological Laboratory, which is nearby.

Agassiz's racial theories have, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, become seen as tarnishing to his scientific record, occasionally prompting the renaming of landmarks, schoolhouses, and other institutions which bear the name of Agassiz (which abound in Massachusetts). Opinions on these events are often torn, given his extensive scientific legacy in other areas. On September 9, 2007 the Swiss government acknowledged the "racist thinking" of Agassiz but declined to rename the Agassizhorn summit.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, Agassiz's opposition to Darwinian evolution and support of creationism and polygenism have become increasingly criticized. In particular, claimed racism related to the polygenism has been criticized, despite even leftist Wikipedia being ambivalent regarding this, citing the dubious Stephen Jay Gould as supposed evidence for Agassiz's racist views, but also stating that "others have asserted that, despite favoring polygenism, Agassiz rejected racism and believed in a spiritualized human unity. Agassiz believed God made all men equal, and that intellectualism and morality, as developed in civilization, make men equal before God. Agassiz never supported slavery, and claimed his views on polygenism had nothing to do with politics." However, polygenism was cited by some supporters of slavery, which has damaged Agassiz's reputation by guilt by association.

Regardless, the accusations of racism against Agassiz have prompted the renaming of landmarks, schoolhouses, and other institutions hat bear his name.

Works (excerpt)

• Recherches sur les poissons fossiles (1833–1843)
• History of the Freshwater Fishes of Central Europe (1839–1842)
• Etudes sur les glaciers (1840)
• Etudes critiques sur les mollusques fossiles (1840–1845)
• Nomenclator Zoologicus (1842–1846)
• Monographie des poissons fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge, ou Systeme Devonien (Old Red Sandstone) des Iles Britanniques et de Russie (1844–1845)
• Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae (1848)
• (with Augustus Addison Gould) Principles of Zoology for the use of Schools and Colleges (Boston, 1848)
• Lake Superior: Its Physical Character, Vegetation and Animals, compared with those of other and similar regions (Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1850)
• Contributions to the natural history of the United States of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1857–1862)
• Geological Sketches (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866)
• A Journey in Brazil (1868)
• De l'espèce et de la classification en zoologie [Essay on classification] (Trans. Felix Vogeli. Paris: Bailière, 1869)
• Geological Sketches (Second Series) (Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1876)
• Essay on Classification, by Louis Agassiz (1962, Cambridge)

External links

• Louis Agassiz und das Historische Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS)

Encyclopedias

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Louis Agassiz
• Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 Edition: Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
• Encyclopedia.com: Louis Agassiz