Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)

by
Paul Miller
KIE Developer

Critique the influence of Agassiz.

I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg, -- that is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.

Louis Agassiz, 1869

One of the great scientists of his day, and one of the "founding fathers" of the American scientific tradition, Louis Agassiz remains something of a historical enigma. A great systematist and paleontologist, a renowned teacher and tireless promoter of science in America, he was also a lifelong opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution. Yet even his most critical attacks on evolution have provided evolutionary biologists with insights.

Biography of Agassiz

The son of a minister, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born on May 28, 1807 in the village of Montier, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Agassiz was educated in the universities of Switzerland and Germany as a physician, like many naturalists of the time. He studied with prominent German biologists, including Oken and Döllinger. These men were followers of Naturphilosophie, a German Romantic philosophy that sought for metaphysical correspondences and interconnections within the world of living things. Though Agassiz later renounced this philosophy, he was never quite able to free himself from its influence. Receiving his medical degree from the University of Erlangen in 1830, he went to Paris in November 1831 to study comparative anatomy under Cuvier, the most famous naturalist in Europe. Cuvier was so impressed with Agassiz's work on fossil fish that he turned over to Agassiz his own notes and drawings for a planned work on fossil fish. Cuvier died in April 1832, yet although their relationship lasted only six months, Agassiz always considered himself an intellectual heir of Cuvier, and defended Cuvier's geological catastrophism and classification of the animals for the rest of his life. With the publication of his vast work on the fossil record of fish, Poissons fossiles, Agassiz's reputation began to grow in the scientific community.

In 1846, Agassiz came to the United States; in 1848 he accepted a professorship at Harvard. He immediately set about organizing and acquiring funding for a great museum of natural history. In 1859 his dream came true with the founding of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which opened its doors in 1860. Agassiz labored for support of science in his adopted homeland; he and his colleagues urged the creation of a National Academy of Sciences, and Agassiz became a founding member in 1863. Agassiz was also appointed a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1863. He campaigned constantly for funds and resources for American science, and for his research projects in particular -- and the funding grew and grew (although it never seemed quite enough for all that Agassiz wanted to do).

Agassiz's Scientific Thought

Agassiz stayed loyal to Cuvier's classification, which divided the animal kingdom into four branches: Vertebrata, Insecta, Vermes (worms) and Radiata (radially symmetrical animals). Within each embranchement the classes could be ranked from lowest to highest; the orders in each class could be similarly ranked, and so on down to the species level, with Homo sapiens sitting at the very top of the scale of life. The cornerstone of Agassiz's biological thought was his belief that the gradation from low to high forms, in any taxon, paralleled the order of appearance in the fossil record, the order of stages in the organisms' development, and the distribution and ecology of the taxon. The "lowest" forms were found lowest in the rock record, earliest in embryonic development, and at the highest latitudes. Agassiz summed up his thought in his Essay on Classification, first published in 1851:

. . . the phenomena of animal life correspond to one another, whether we compare their rank as determined by structural complication with the phases of their growth, or with their succession in past geological ages; whether we compare this succession with their relative growth, or all these different relations with each other and with the geographical distribution of animals upon the earth. The same series everywhere!