Louis Agassiz

Abstract

SELDOM has the influence of early environment been more marked in a scientific career than in the life of Louis Agassiz. Born in 1807 at the little village of Motier, in the plains of Switzerland, he passed his childhood on the shores of the Lake of Morat, the waters of which were a perennial source of delight to him. He took more special interest in its living things; knew the haunts and habits of its fishes, and could lure them to him by various ingenious boyish spells, or track them to their hiding-places in the old walls that were lapped by the water. He began to collect birds, insects, shells, and other objects long before he had acquired any book-knowledge of natural history. Between the Lake of Morat and the larger expanse of the Lake of Neuchâel lies a strip of fertile country rich in woodlands and flowers, and full of bird-life. On the further side of Lake Morat, towering above the scene of the great battle wherein the Swiss routed the army of Charles the Bold, rise the far snowy summits of the Bernese Oberland. Nursed amid these surroundings, and encouraged and guided by wise parental care, the child most truly was father to the man. His intense love of nature and of all living creatures developed into the enthusiasm of one of the foremost naturalists of the time. His childish devotion to the fishes of Lake Morat settled into the earnest and untiring spirit of research among living and extinct fishes which made him the leading ichthyologist of Europe. His passion for the mountains with their snow-fields and glaciers grew into that clear insight and power of philosophical generalisation which have placed the name of Louis Agassiz at the very head of the pioneers by whom the story of the wonderful Ice Age has been unravelled.

Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence.

Edited by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. Two Volumes, 8vo. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1885.)