in 1846 and became a great popularizer of science. His scientific views, though embraced by an adoring public, were often characterized by inflexible convictions that could not be interrogated by experiment. As the years went on, he alienated fellow scientists such as Charles Darwin and botanist Asa Gray.
For the most part Agassiz avoided his home country. But when he died, his son Alexander reached back to his father’ s roots in Switzerland and in geology for a proper memorial. A cousin in the old country sent a 2,500-pound trapezoidal block of the Central Aar granite, whose smooth, foliated surfaces are ideal for inscription. It was shipped“ rough as it came from the Glacier, untouched by the hand of the Stone-Cutter,” requiring only the lettering to be added.“ Although lifeless itself,” notes biographer Christoph Irmscher,“ Agassiz’ s boulder... captures the irony that lies behind Agassiz’ s science itself: the assumption, presented as a certainty, that in nature all living things stay as they are had been developed by a scientist who had not stayed where he was.”
Louis Agassiz Monument, Lot 2640 Bellwort Path.
When Louis Agassiz( 1807 – 1873) died at age 66, he was a long way from home. As a young man, he revolutionized geological science in his native Switzerland by assembling evidence for and naming the“ Ice Age”: a period when glaciers blanketed much of the Northern Hemisphere, leaving behind a landscape of scarred, polished, and ground-up rocks. He conducted firsthand research on the Aar Glacier in southern Switzerland, measuring the flow of ice rivers and illustrating their effects on the local bedrock, the Central Aar granite. Lithographs in his beautiful book Études sur les Glaciers( 1840) show blocks of such stone riding along a conveyor belt of ice toward their deposition in a remote moraine.
The Central Aar granite is a coarse-grained, calcium-rich granite that shouldered its way to the earth’ s surface as the Alps were being formed. The granite was lightly metamorphosed in a later phase( alpine greenschist metamorphosis), creating quartz veins and a foliated texture( i. e., alignment of minerals along parallel planes), which causes the rock to break into trapezoidal forms under the pressure of glacial ice.
Agassiz found America a greater arena for his scientific career than provincial Switzerland. He came to Harvard
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