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
2016 Volume 2 | 23