Agassiz, JEAN LOUIS RODOLPHE, one of the most eminent naturalists of his time, was born at the village of Motier, in the canton of Fribourg, Switzerland, on the 28th day of May 1807. At ten years of age he was placed at a college for boys at Bienne, preparatory, as was then understood, to entering upon a mercantile life; but so marked an aptitude for the pursuit of natural history was manifested during his course here, that he was permitted to continue his studies at Lausanne and Zürich, and afterwards at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich, graduating in medicine at the latter institution in 1830.
Prior to his graduation, he prepared a description of the Fishes of Brazil (from specimens gathered by Spix, under the patronage of the king of Bavaria), which elicited a warm encomium from Cuvier, with whom he was afterwards associated on terms of intimacy. Near the close of 1831 he repaired to Paris to pursue his investigations at the Museum of Natural History, where, receiving some pecuniary assistance from Baron Humboldt, he was enabled to remain until the autumn of 1832, when he accepted a professorship at Neuchâtel. In 1833 he commenced the publication of his Researches on the Fossil Fishes, which the following year brought him from London the Wollaston prize. In 1834 he visited England for the first time, where he was warmly welcomed, and in 1836 commenced an examination of the glacial phenomena of the Alps, his theory of which subsequently found expression in his Études sur les Glaciers (1840), and in his Système Glaciaire (1847). In 1839 he published a Natural History of the Fresh-water Fishes of Central Europe.
In the summer of 1840 Agassiz established a station of observation on the Alps (where, with a corps of assistants, he spent each summer until 1844), and in the following autumn he visited the Scottish Highlands, with gratifying results, for additional evidence in support of his glacial theory.
In October 1846 Agassiz went to America, and delivered in Boston a course of lectures On the Plan of the Creation. These at once established his reputation as a popular lecturer, and during the winters of 1847 and 1848 he lectured in the principal cities of the United States, everywhere with success. In 1848 he was elected to the chair of Natural History in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, and in the summer of that year, in company with a class of students, made a scientific expedition to the northern shores of Lake Superior. At the invitation of Professor Bache, Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, he spent the winter of 1850–51 in an expedition to the Florida Reefs, his report upon which was afterwards published in the Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1851, in addition to his work at Cambridge, he accepted a professorship at the Medical College of Charleston, South Carolina, where he spent the following winter, and in the spring delivered a course of lectures at Washington, before the Smithsonian Institution, of which he was soon appointed a Regent. In 1854 he was invited to a chair in the university of Zürich, Switzerland, which he declined, and the following year, assisted by his daughters, he established at Cambridge a young ladies' school, which was continued for eight years, until closed in consequence of the civil war. Meanwhile, Agassiz had planned an important work, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, to be published in ten 4to vols., of which he lived to issue only four. He declined the chair of Palæontology in the Museum of Natural History at Paris, in 1857, receiving soon after the Order of the Legion of Honour from the French emperor.
By the death of Mr Francis C. Gray of Boston, in 1858, a bequest of 50,000 was received for the establishment of a Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, to which the state of Massachusetts added a grant of 100,000 in lands; and the sum of 75,000 was contributed by private individuals—Agassiz giving all his collections, which represented a pecuniary outlay of 10,000.
Three or four years of incessant though otherwise uneventful work in connection with this museum so undermined his health, that he decided upon a trip to Brazil; but his intentions becoming known, funds were raised, a corps of assistants was organised, and the 'quiet trip' at first contemplated was transformed into one of the most important scientific expeditions of Agassiz's whole life. After an absence of sixteen months, he returned to the United States, the account of his trip, as prepared by his wife, being published under the title of A Journey in Brazil. In 1872 he visited California, and next year received for a summer school of Natural History a gift of the island of Penikese in Buzzard's Bay, on the Massachusetts coast, and a money endowment of $50,000. He lived to organise and conduct this unique school for one season only, and died December 14, 1873.
See the Life and Correspondence, edited by his wife (2 vols. 1886), the monograph by C. F. Holden (1893), and the Life, Letters, and Works of L. Agassiz by Jules Marcou (2 vols. 1896).
His son, ALEXANDER, author of Contributions to American Thalassography (1888), was born at Neuchâtel, 17th December 1835, and went to the Harvard Museum in 1859. He made a fortune in the copper-mines of Lake Superior, and returning to the museum in 1871, became curator on his father's death in 1873, but retired in 1885. He has engaged extensively in deep-sea dredging; founded the zoological station at Newport, Rhode Island; and has written works on the embryology of the star-fishes, the flounders, and the ctenophora, and numerous contributions to scientific journals in various departments of zoology.