Maker Info
Louis Agassiz
Born 28 May 1807, in Fribourg, Switzerland; died 14 December 1873, in Cambridge, MA.
Ph.D., University of Erlangen, 1829; M.D., University of Münich, 1830.
Louis Agassiz studied under Oken and Döllinger in Germany, and then with Cuvier in Paris. Von Humboldt was a supporter. After a position as Professor at the Lyceum of Neuchatel in Switzerland, he migrated in 1846 to the U.S. He became a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard in 1848, and the first director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which he founded in 1859. His research interests included icthyology and echinodermology, and he developed the theory of the ice ages. He is considered the Father of Glaciology, and he founded the field of Paleoichthyology. He is well known for being a critic of Darwinian views, quoted in 1867 as saying, "I trust to outlive this mania."
He counted among his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and played key roles in the foundation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academy of Sciences.
