After studies of medicine and biology in Zurich, Heidelberg and Munich, Agassiz, which had already published the first work on fish of the Amazon, obtained a science doctorate with Erlangen (D) in 1829, then in medicine in Munich in 1830. Being returned the same year in Paris, it met there Cuvier, which placed at its disposal its vast documentation on fossil fish.

After the death of Vat, Agassiz came to Neuchâtel where a pulpit of natural history was created especially for him with the gymnasium (1832-1846) and the academy (1838-1846). It published inter alia Research on fossil fish (5 illustrated volumes of 400 boards, 1833-1843) and of the Monographs of Echinodermata vivans (sic) and fossils (4 volumes, 1838-1842). Pushed by Jean de Charpentier, it extended his field of investigation to geology, establishing in Etudes on the glaciers of 1840 the existence of the glacial period (Glaciology). In same time, it enriched the collections by the Museum of natural history of Neuchâtel.

Involved in debt by its expensive scientific publications on account of author, he saw himself entrusting by the king of Prussia, on the intervention of Alexandre de Humboldt, the comparative study of faunas of Europe and the New-World. He undertook in 1846-1847 a lecture tour in the United States and gained such a success that the Harvard university of Cambridge founded for him a pulpit of zoology and geology.

Its second marriage encouraged it to remain in the United States. Forwardings with the Higher lake, in Florida, to Brazil and around South America brought discoveries relating to the traces left by the glaciers, the corals and the fauna oceanic depths. The brought back collections of these voyages became the core of the Museum off Comparative Zoology of Cambridge. Of ten volumes which the main work of Agassiz should have counted, Contributions to the Natural History off the United States, four only transfers the day between 1857 and 1862. They treat in particular development of the tortoises and morphology of the jellyfishes.

Agassiz opposed later to the Darwinian evolutionism a theory on the appearance of the species in distinct natural “provinces” (Of the species and classification in zoology, 1869). Science him must have primarily founded the systematic one of fossil fish, spread the glaciologic designs in the countries Anglo-Saxon and inaugurated the teaching of the zoology in the United States.

Bibliography

H. Balmer, “Louis Agassiz, 1807-1873”, in Gesnerus, 31,1974,1-18

E. Kuhn-Schnyder, Louis Agassiz als Paläontologe, 1975

Hist. of the University from Neuchâtel, 1,1988,169-197