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Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

Male 1807 - 1873  (66 years)

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  • Name Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz 
    Born 28 May 1807  Môtier-en-Vuly, Friborg, ____, Switzerland Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Gender Male 
    Died 14 Dec 1873  Cambridge, Middlesex Co., MA Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Buried Aft 14 Dec 1873  Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex Co., MA Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Notes 
    • http://research.amnh.org/ichthyology/neoich/collectors/agassiz.html

      Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
      born 28 May,1807, Friborg Switzerland
      died 14 December,1873, Cambridge, MA

      Biographic notes

      Like many of the 19th century naturalists, Agassiz was educated in the medical tradition and qualified as a physician. He developed a keen interest in natural history at an early age. Attended the University of Zürich 1824, Heidelberg 1826, and suffered a severe case of typhoid fever in 1827, returning to Switzerland to recover. Attended University of Munich 1827-1830, where he studied under Oken, Martius , and Döllinger. Was an accomplished swordsman; the sabre his weapon of choice. Received the Ph.D. in the spring of 1829 from the Univ. of Erlangen. In 1827, following the death of Spix in 1826, Martius gave his collections of Amazonian fishes to Agassiz for study, encouraging that he complete study for the Ph.D. Received the medical degree in April, 1830, 9 months after the publication of the Fishes of Brazil , which attracted the attention of Cuvier. In 1829 the director of the natural history museum in Munich offered Agassiz the ability to work on a collection of fossil fishes. With Joseph Dinkel as his artist, he began work on Poissons Fossiles . Arrived in Paris in November, 1831 to study comparative anatomy under Cuvier, who provided space in his lab for Agassiz and his assistants. Agassiz made such an impression on Cuvier that he abandoned, in favor of Agassiz, plans for a major work on fossil fishes, releasing his materials, drawings and notes. Agassiz quickly developed a reputation throughout Europe. Humboldt , for example, contributed 1000 francs toward publication of Poissons Fossiles. Agassiz left Paris in September 1832 following the death of Cuvier in May, accepting a modest position as professor of natural history at the Lyceum of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where he developed his ideas on continental glaciation and earth history.

      Neuchâtel 1832-1845
      It was during these years in Switzerland that Agassiz developed his strong reputation as a scientist and lecturer, and developed the personal associations with colleagues and assistants that would persist throughout his career. Agassiz very much aspired to follow in Cuvier's footsteps, however, while Cuvier was extremely directed and efficient, making geat use of his assistants, Agassiz always failed at properly managing them. This period in his life was notable for the number of projects and publications that Agassiz embarked upon, not all of which were completed, and for the large entourage that he assembled, all of which were under his personal financial support. Expenses began to greatly exceed his modest salary and the philanthropy of friends and family. Realizing that his present position could not afford him the means of achieving his professional ambitions, he decided to seek a change by embarking on a tour of first Europe, then the United States.

      Cambridge 1846-1848
      After a brief stay with a cousin in New York, Agassiz travelled widely in the U.S., visiting Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Charleston. Upon his return to New York, he was met by his assistants Edward Desor and Charles Girard, and they established residence in Boston in April 1847 and joined by his former artist Burkhardt in November. In January 1848, Agassiz was approached by John A. Lowell about accepting a professorship at Harvard College, a position in zoology and geology created for him by Abbott Lawrence, which he accepted. June 30 to August 15 1848 explored Lake Superior, resulted in the publication Lake Superior: Its Physical Character, Vegetation and Animals, Compared with those of Other and Similar Regions, March 1850. Upon his return, learned of the the death of his wife at Baden on 27 July 1848 .

      Americanization, 1849-1860
      Upon his return from an extended visit to Philadelphia, researching at the Univ. of Pennsylvania and the Academy of Natural Sciences, Agassiz was remarried to Elizabeth C. Cary of Boston in the spring of 1850. She took over the household, now complete upon the arrival of the children from Switzerland, and became an invaluable scientific assistant. Agassiz visited Charleston four times between 1847 and 1852 as adjuct professor at the medical College, contracting a severe case of malaria in 1852, from which he barely recovered. Moved his household from Oxford Street to Quincy in 1853. There Mrs. Agassiz opened a school for girls and the income it generated greatly helped to offset the growing expenses. In 1855 began the subscription series Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. In August 1857, Agassiz was offered the chair of paleontology at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, which he declined.

      The Agassiz Museum
      In May 1860, the first phase of construction on the Museum of Comparative Zoology was completed. A detailed history of the MCZ was provided by Windsor (1987). Agassiz's collection were transfered from the small wooden house, which was later moved and renovated to become the eventual Zoological Hall for the use of students and assistants at the museum. The MCZ was inaugurated November 13, 1860. Soon after, due in part to mounting financial pressures, discontent among his students and assistants, Agassiz's health slowly began to fade. Agassiz tried in vain to stop the sweep of Darwinism, and was most distressed by the fact that, with the exception of Asa Gray, most proponents of Darwinian thinking in the U.S. at that time were not naturalists. A parallel can be drawn between Agassiz's opposition to Darwinism and Cuvier's debate with Geoffroy-St. Hillaire. The American Civil War was yet another obstacle in the building of the museum and Agassiz lost several students to military service. In part, as an escape from the mounting pressures, and because of declining health since the Charleston malaria episode, Agassiz sought with much relish the opportunity to visit Brazil and rekindle his long-standing intretest in Amazonian ichthyology begun during work on the collections of Spix & Martius. Agassiz, his wife, six assistants and several volunteers embarked on the Thayer Expedition to Brazil between April 1865 and July 1866.

      After the Thayer Expedition, during the spring of 1869, Agassiz participated in the deep-sea dredging project of the U.S. Coast Survey, and in 1871 participated in the Hassler Expedition to conduct deep-sea dredging along the coast from New England to San Francisco, also accompanied by F. Steindachner . Steindachner first came to Cambridge in May, 1870 to assist Agassiz for 2 years in the curation of fishes from the Thayer Expedition. Steindachner returned to Vienna in 1872. In 1873 Agassiz founded the Anderson School of Natural History at Penikese Island off the southern coast of Massachusetts. Although it did not survive long after Agassiz's death, the school was a point of contact between Agassiz and several notable students, including C.O. Whitman and D.S. Jordan.

      Agassiz's last day at the museum was December 6, 1873. Agassiz's grave at Mount Auburn is marked by a 2500 lb. granite boulder transported from the Aar glacial moraine near his original home.
      __________________________

      http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/agassiz.html

      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, -- that is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.
      Louis Agassiz, 1869

      One of the great scientists of his day, and one of the "founding fathers" of the modern American scientific tradition, Louis Agassiz remains something of a historical enigma. A great systematist and paleontologist, a renowned teacher and tireless promoter of science in America, he was also a lifelong opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution. Yet even his most critical attacks on evolution have provided evolutionary biologists with insights.

      Biography of Agassiz

      The son of a minister, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born on May 28, 1807 in the village of Montier, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Agassiz was educated in the universities of Switzerland and Germany as a physician, like many naturalists of the time. He studied with prominent German biologists, including Oken and Döllinger. These men were followers of Naturphilosophie, a German Romantic philosophy that sought for metaphysical correspondences and interconnections within the world of living things. Though Agassiz later renounced this philosophy, he was never quite able to free himself from its influence. Receiving his medical degree from the University of Erlangen in 1830, he went to Paris in November 1831 to study comparative anatomy under Cuvier, the most famous naturalist in Europe. Cuvier was so impressed with Agassiz's work on fossil fish that he turned over to Agassiz his own notes and drawings for a planned work on fossil fish. Cuvier died in April 1832, yet although their relationship lasted only six months, Agassiz always considered himself an intellectual heir of Cuvier For the rest of his life, Agassiz promoted and defended Cuvier's geological catastrophism and classification of the animals. With the publication of his vast work on the fossil record of fish, Poissons fossiles, Agassiz's reputation began to grow in the scientific community.

      After Cuvier's death, Agassiz took up a professorship at the Lyceum of Neuchatel in Switzerland, where for thirteen years he worked on many projects in paleontology, systematics, and glaciology. Agassiz took up the study of glaciers in 1836 as something of a sideline, but his contributions made him known as the "Father of Glaciology." Observing the glaciers of his native Switzerland, Agassiz noticed the marks that glaciers left on the Earth: great valleys; large glacial erratic boulders carried long distances; scratches and smoothing of rocks; mounds of debris called moraines pushed up by glacial advances. He realized that in many places these signs of glaciation could be seen where no glaciers existed. Previous scientists had variously explained these features as made by icebergs or floods; Agassiz integrated all these facts to formulate his theory that a great Ice Age had once gripped the Earth, and published his theory in Étude sur les glaciers in 1840. His later book, Système glaciare (1847), presented further evidence for his theory, gathered all over Europe: Agassiz later found even more evidence of glaciation in North America.

      In 1846, Agassiz came to the United States; in 1848 he accepted a professorship at Harvard. He immediately set about organizing and acquiring funding for a great museum of natural history. In 1859 his dream came true with the founding of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which opened its doors in 1860. Agassiz labored for support of science in his adopted homeland; he and his colleagues urged the creation of a National Academy of Sciences, and Agassiz became a founding member in 1863. Agassiz was also appointed a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1863. He campaigned constantly for funds and resources for American science, and for his research projects in particular -- and the funding grew and grew (although it never seemed quite enough for all that Agassiz wanted to do -- and although Agassiz himself never quite finished most of his grand projects).

      Agassiz's Scientific Thought

      Agassiz stayed loyal to Cuvier's classification, which divided the animal kingdom into four branches: Vertebrata, Insecta, Vermes (worms) and Radiata (radially symmetrical animals). Within each embranchement the classes could be ranked from lowest to highest; the orders in each class could be similarly ranked, and so on down to the species level, with Homo sapiens sitting at the very top of the scale of life. The cornerstone of Agassiz's biological thought was his belief that the gradation from low to high forms, in any taxon, paralleled the order of appearance in the fossil record, the order of stages in the organisms' development, and the distribution and ecology of the taxon. The "lowest" forms were found lowest in the rock record, earliest in embryonic development, and at the highest latitudes. Agassiz summed up his thought in his Essay on Classification, first published in 1851:

      . . . the phenomena of animal life correspond to one another, whether we compare their rank as determined by structural complication with the phases of their growth, or with their succession in past geological ages; whether we compare this succession with their relative growth, or all these different relations with each other and with the geographical distribution of animals upon the earth. The same series everywhere!
      Darwin, and many others after him, accepted these parallelisms as providing evidence for evolution. Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species that "this doctrine of Agassiz accords well with the theory of natural selection," and Haeckel in particular invoked the "recapitulation of phylogeny by ontogeny" in support of evolution. But Agassiz was no evolutionist; in fact, he was probably the last reputable scientist to reject evolution outright for any length of time after the publication of The Origin of Species. Agassiz saw the Divine Plan of God everywhere in nature, and could not reconcile himself to a theory that did not invoke design. He defined a species as "a thought of God." As he wrote in his Essay on Classification:

      The combination in time and space of all these thoughtful conceptions exhibits not only thought, it shows also premeditation, power, wisdom, greatness, prescience, omniscience, providence. In one word, all these facts in their natural connection proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and love; and Natural History must in good time become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe. . .

      Agassiz continued Cuvier's catastrophism theory -- the Earth had been periodically wracked by global catastrophes, after each of which new species of animals and plants had appeared. Followers of Cuvier had suggested that the Biblical Flood was the last catastrophe. Agassiz replaced the Flood with his glaciers, which he thought had been formed instantaneously all over the world; he called glaciers "God's great plough," and tried unsucessfully to find evidence of glaciation in Brazil.

      Agassiz's works on living and fossil fish and on glaciers have remained classics. His work on glaciers revolutionized geology, and drove another nail in the coffin of the Biblical Flood as a serious scientific hypothesis. He trained and influenced a generation of American zoologists and paleontologists, including Alpheus Hyatt, William Healey Dall, David Starr Jordan, Nathaniel Shaler, and Edward S. Morse. He left a mark on the development and the practice of American science, and brought science to "the man in the street" as no one else had before. People from all over the world read his books, sent him specimens, and asked his advice. By the time of his death, on December 14, 1873, he was publicly recognized as America's leading scientist.

      His philosophy of nature, aiming to understand the Divine Plan, is the last great expression of the old school of natural theology, started by men like John Ray almost two hundred years before. Natural theology had once inspired countless scientists, including Darwin and his forerunners, but by the time of publication of the Origin of Species it had largely run out of steam, unable to offer any real explanation for natural phenomena except "God made it that way." Within Agassiz's lifetime, and much to his grief, most of his students -- including his son Alexander, a well-known naturalist in his own right -- became evolutionists, though not necessarily Darwinians.

      Yet Agassiz still made lasting contributions to evolutionary biology and systematics. His construction of a classification that did not depend on any process of evolution has been followed up in the work of the "pattern cladist" school of systematists,who try to reconstruct organismal relationships without relying on assumptions of what processes generated them. His finding of parallels between ontogeny, paleontology, and morphology was rapidly adopted by biologists like Haeckel and used to support evolution. Today, these parallels are known not to be exact correspondences, but the links between development and evolution remain an area of active research. Perhaps Agassiz's greatest lasting insight was the realization that paleontology, embryology, ecology, and biogeography had to contribute to any classification that purported to show the true relationships of organisms -- even if those relationships, to Agassiz, existed only in the mind of God. As he wrote in his Essay on Classification:

      Classification seems to me to rest upon too narrow a foundation when it is chiefly based on structure. Animals are linked together as closely by their mode of development, by their relative standing in their respective classes, by the order in which they have made their appearance upon earth, by their geographical distribution, and generally by their connection with the world in which they live, as by their anatomy. All these relations should, therefore, be fully expressed in a natural classification; and though structure furnishes the most direct indication of some of these relations, always appreciable under every circumstance, other considerations should not be neglected which may complete our insight into the general plan of creation.

      The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, founded by Agassiz, is still a leading natural history museum.
    Person ID I53336  Stedman/Steadman/Steedman Families of the New World
    Last Modified 7 Jan 2006 

    Family 1 Miss [--?--],   d. 27 Jul 1848, ____, ____, ____, Germany Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Married Bef 1848 
    Last Modified 7 Jan 2006 
    Family ID F19669  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

    Family 2 Elizabeth Cabot "Lizzie" Cary,   b. 5 Dec 1822, Boston, Suffolk Co., MA Find all individuals with events at this location,   d. 27 Jun 1907, Arlington Heights, Middlesex Co., MA Find all individuals with events at this location  (Age 84 years) 
    Married Apr 1850 
    Last Modified 7 Jan 2006 
    Family ID F19668  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  • Event Map
    Link to Google MapsDied - 14 Dec 1873 - Cambridge, Middlesex Co., MA Link to Google Earth
    Link to Google MapsBuried - Aft 14 Dec 1873 - Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex Co., MA Link to Google Earth
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