6/27/2012 12:20:33 PM
Mount Auburn Cemetery
Louis Agassiz was born in Switzerland and educated in Switzerland and Germany. He studied Natural History with an emphasis on botany. He earned a degree in philosophy and then in medicine. Finally in Paris, he studied zoology, geology, and ichthyology. In 1832, he became a professor of Natural History at the University of Neuchatel. He did extensive research on the fresh water fish of central Europe. Agassiz is most noted for his proposal that the earth had once been subjected to an ice age. At the time, it was extremely controversial but we now know that the earth has had many episodes of glaciations. During the years 1842-1846 he worked on and published a classified list of all names employed in zoology for genera and groups. In 1846, after giving a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston, MA, he was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was instrumental in the establishment and became the head of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and in 1859, he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel. Later, he accepted a professorship at Harvard University in the United States.