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16 unusual facts about Louis Agassiz


Alice Mary Longfellow

She maintained friendships with the wives of some of her father's friends, such as Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, the wife of the natural historian and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, and Annie Adams Fields, the wife of her father's publisher, James Thomas Fields of Ticknor and Fields.

Antoine Sonrel

He moved from Neuchâtel to the United States around the late 1840s, and was affiliated with Louis Agassiz throughout his career.

Benjamin F. Goss

From an early age, Goss was an avid amateur naturalist, beginning at the age of 18 a correspondence with fellow enthusiasts (including Louis Agassiz and experts at the Smithsonian Institute) which would last for many years.

Coast Survey

Coast Survey commissioned famed naturalist Louis Agassiz to conduct the first scientific study of the Florida reef system.

Haplocanthosaurus

Soon after his original description, Hatcher came to believe the name Haplocanthus had already been used for a genus of acanthodian fish (Haplacanthus, named by Louis Agassiz in 1845), and was thus preoccupied.

Hugh Edwin Strickland

For this society Strickland corrected, enlarged and edited the manuscript of Agassiz for the Bibliographia Zoologiae et Geologiae (1848).

James Cooley Fletcher

In 1862, Fletcher sailed more than 3,000 kilometers through the Amazon River to collect species for professor Louis Agassiz.

Lake Agassiz

First postulated in 1823 by William H. Keating, it was named by Warren Upham in 1879 after Louis Agassiz, when Upham recognized that the lake was formed by glacial action.

Nathaniel Thayer, Jr.

He contributed to a commons hall, erected Thayer Hall in 1870 as a memorial of his father and brother, bore the expenses of Louis Agassiz's expedition to South America (which was known as the Thayer Expedition), built a fire-proof herbarium at the botanic garden, and gave much in aid of poor students of the college.

Penikese Island

In early 1873, Louis Agassiz, the famous Swiss-American naturalist, persuaded Anderson to give him the island as a site for and $50,000 to endow a school for natural history where students would study nature instead of books.

Pre-Adamite

The developed concept of ice ages, pioneered by Louis Agassiz, seemed to provide evidence of such events, drawing the line between the pre-Adamic era and the modern one (which she posited as beginning about 6,000 years ago).

Rhyzobius

Louis Agassiz in 1846 argued that Stephens intended to write "Rhizobius" all along and formally proposed to change the name thus, but this is considered unwarranted.

Runner of the Mountain Tops

Runner of the Mountain Tops: The Life of Louis Agassiz is a children's biography of the nineteenth-century paleontologist and natural scientist Louis Agassiz by Mabel Robinson.

Sir Philip Grey Egerton, 10th Baronet

While travelling in Switzerland with Lord Cole (later to be 3rd earl of Enniskillen) they were introduced to Prof. L Agassiz at Neufchâtel, and determined to make a special study of fossil fish.

Walcott–Rust quarry

In 1873 Walcott and Rust sold their collections to Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.

William Cole, 3rd Earl of Enniskillen

This included many specimens that were described and figured by Agassiz and Egerton.


Louis François de Pourtalès

He was a pupil of Louis Agassiz, whom he accompanied in 1840 on glacial expeditions in the Alps and in 1847 to the United States, where in 1848 he entered the government Coast Survey.

Observatoire Oceanologique de Villefranche

The Russian Academy of Sciences then established a zoological station in the building, and Russian, French, and American experimental biologists including Aleksei Alekseevich Korotnev, Karl Vogt, Hermann Fol, Jules Henri Barrois, Élie Metchnikoff and Louis Agassiz started to work on embryos and the planktonic fauna collected in the bay.