Great Geologists | 53
Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz photographed c. 1865. Photographer
unknown.
The Aargletschers (or Aare Glaciers) are a remote, yet undeniably
spectacular location in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland. Even
today, they require a serious effort to visit and explore. Yet in
1840, a dynamic Swiss scientist had a hut constructed there
(“Hôtel des Neuchâtelois”) to live in whilst studying the structure
and movement of the ice. This scientist was Louis Agassiz,
a biologist and paleontologist, who had previously gained
fame for his work on living and fossil fish. He emigrated to
the United States in 1846, becoming a renowned professor at
Harvard University, arguably the first great American scientist.
Agassiz has become a controversial figure, not least for his
staunch opposition to evolution and his views on race, yet there
is no denying his significant contributions to geology, both
paleontological and in promoting the view that the Earth had, in
its relatively recent past, been subjected to an “ice age”.
Agassiz was born in Môtier in the Fribourg canton of Switzerland
in 1807. Originally planning for a career in medicine, he studied
at the universities of Zurich, Heidelburg and Munich. However,
an interest in natural history led him to be selected for the study
of a collection of fish brought back from an expedition to the
Amazon. All thoughts of medicine were abandoned, and with an
enthusiasm that was to characterise all his scientific endeavours,
he completed and published the descriptions of this fauna in
1829. This, and an interest in the freshwater fish of Central
Europe, led to his appointment as Professor of Natural History at
the University of Neuchâtel in 1832.
By this time, fossil fish had come to his attention. Agassiz visited
the principal museums of Europe to study fossil fish collections.
This included a stay in Paris with Georges Cuvier, the great
French paleontologist, geologist and zoologist, whose skills in
comparative anatomy must have inspired the young Agassiz.
Cuvier was also a strong promoter of a catastrophist view of
Earth history and no doubt, this too, influenced Agassiz in his
subsequent geological work.
Five volumes of Recherches sur les poissons fossiles (“Research
on Fossil Fish”) were published by Agassiz at intervals from 1833
to 1843, describing and classifying 1,700 species. These works
are hardly surpassed today in the quality of their descriptions
and illustrations (the latter being mainly undertaken by Joseph
Dinkel). The 1,290 original illustrations for the volumes can be
found housed in The Geological Society in London. They were
donated to the Society by the Earl of Ellesmere, a scientific
benefactor, who purchased them to fund Agassiz’s research. The
sheer scale of these publications, which incorporated a novel
new ichthyological classification, marked Agassiz as a leading
scientist of the day.
Further paleontological research involved descriptions of fossil
echinoderms and molluscs and a special study of the remarkable
fossil fish of the Devonian Old Red Sandstone from the Orcadian
Basin of northern Scotland. But by 1837, Agassiz’s thoughts
were turning to another subject — ice and its widespread