American Historical Ephemera & Photography Online

2 1/8 x 3 1/2 in. CDV on cardstock mount (signature very good; few light scattered spots on print, otherwise very good). Sonrel's Boston imprint on mount verso.

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born in the Swiss canton of Fribourg. He studied at a series of European (mostly German) universities (Zurich, Heidelberg, Munich, Erlangen). He became a student of Alexander von Humboldt in Paris and later worked under Georges Cuvier. Under the tutelage of these giants, Agassiz began his career in geology and zoology, later focusing on ichthyology. While Agassiz was interested in both living and fossil forms (he described the popular Megalodon), he never embraced Darwinian evolution, possibly, in part, because of the influence of his father who was a pastor. Agassiz did propose that the earth had previously been in an ice age and analyzed its effects on the Northern Hemisphere.

He visited North America in the 1840s, and emigrated to the United States in 1847. He became professor of zoology and geology at Harvard and headed the Lawrence Scientific School and founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz made major contributions to the various fields of interest, but is often overlooked, or even dismissed, because of his rejection of evolution and his support for polygenism (the idea that plants, animals and people had been created in many {poly} regions, not necessarily equally). Along with the latter, Agassiz was very racist, arguing the inferiority to Europeans of most of the other populations on earth. But his observational gathering and analysis were excellent, even if his conclusions were sometimes biased by his prejudices.