Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz ( December 17, 1835 – March 27, 1910 ), son of Louis Agassiz and stepson of Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, was an American scientist and engineer.

Agassiz was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and immigrated to the United States with his father in 1849.

The ancient jawless fish Cephalaspis lyelli, which dwelt in the lochs of Scotland, was named by Louis Agassiz in honour of Lyell.

It is thought that this event was caused by the final drainage of Lake Agassiz, which had been confined by the glaciers, disrupting the thermohaline circulation of the Atlantic.

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz ( May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873 ) was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history.

Louis Agassiz was born in Môtier ( now part of Haut-Vully ) in the canton of Fribourg, Switzerland.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan later wrote, " Somebody – Dr. Angell, perhaps – remarked that ' Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.

Spix, who died in 1826, did not live long enough to work out the history of these fish, and Agassiz ( though fresh out of school ) was selected by Martius for this purpose.

In 1836 the Wollaston Medal was awarded to Agassiz by the council of that society for his work on fossil ichthyology ; and in 1838 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society.

Agassiz was grateful for the help the women had given him in examining fossil fish specimens during his visit to Lyme Regis in 1834.

In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age.

Thus familiarized with the phenomena associated with the movements of recent glaciers, Agassiz was prepared for a discovery which he made in 1840, in conjunction with William Buckland.

The mountainous districts of England, Wales, and Ireland were also considered to constitute centres for the dispersion of glacial debris ; and Agassiz remarked " that great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel ( boulder drift ) is found ; that this gravel was in general produced by the trituration of the sheets of ice upon the subjacent surface, etc.

From this time his scientific studies dropped off, but he was a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields, teaching decades worth of future prominent scientists, including Alpheus Hyatt, David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Ernest Ingersoll, William James, Nathaniel Shaler, Samuel Hubbard Scudder, Alpheus Packard, and his son Alexander Agassiz, among others.

By 1857 he was so well-loved that his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote " The fiftieth birthday of Agassiz " in his honor.

Quincy Adams Shaw and his brother-in-law Henry Higginson became major investors in the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, and Shaw was the first president of the company and retained that position until 1871, when Agassiz's son Alexander Agassiz took over.

The Cambridge elementary school north of Harvard University was named in his honor and the surrounding neighborhood became known as " Agassiz " as a result.

Agassiz was specifically a believer and advocate in polygenism, that races came from separate origins ( specifically separate creations ), were endowed with unequal attributes, and could be classified into specific climatic zones, in the same way he felt other animals and plants could be classified.

Agassiz was never a supporter of slavery he claimed his views had nothing to do with politics.

Agassiz was influenced by philosophical idealism and the scientific work of Georges Cuvier.

Agassiz was a creationist who believed nature had order because God has created it directly and Agassiz viewed his career in science for the search of ideas in the mind of the creator expressed in creation.

In 1863, enlisting the support of Alexander Dallas Bache and Charles Henry Davis, a professional astronomer recently recalled from the Navy to Washington to head the Bureau of Navigation, Louis Agassiz and Benjamin Peirce planned the steps whereby the National Academy of Sciences was to be established.

The cydippid ctenophore Pleurobrachia bachei A. Agassiz, 1860 was named for him ; it was discovered in 1859 by Alexander Agassiz who was working as an engineer on a ship surveying the United States / Canada boundary between Washington State and British Columbia.

Agassiz served as a non-resident lecturer at Cornell while also being on faculty at Harvard.

According to Agassiz the conditions in which particular creatures live “ are the conditions necessary to their maintenance, and what among organized beings is essential to their temporal existence must be at least one of the conditions under which they were created ”.

Agassiz questioned how fish of the same species live in lakes well separated with no joining waterway, Agassiz concluded they were created at both locations.

According to Agassiz, the different races were created in different provinces, each race was indigenous to the province it was created in, he cited evidence from Egyptian monuments to prove that fixity of racial types had existed for at least five millennia.

For example Nathaniel Shaler who had studied under Agassiz at Harvard was a believer in Agassiz's polygenism.

* Runner of the Mountain Tops: The Life of Louis Agassiz, by Mabel Louise Robinson ( 1930 ) – free download at manybooks. net

Agassiz eventually immigrated to the United States and taught at Harvard University in 1846.

Agassiz, Davis, Peirce, Benjamin Gould, and Senator Wilson met at Bache's house and " hurriedly wrote the bill incorporating the Academy, including in it the name of fifty incorporators ".

* 1837 – Louis Agassiz begins his glaciation studies which eventually demonstrate that the Earth has had at least one ice age

In Boston, at a banquet attended by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, Boston mayor Frederic W. Lincoln, Jr., Harvard president James Walker, and other luminaries, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes toasted " Paul Morphy, the World Chess Champion ".

Ulen is the southern terminus of the Agassiz Recreational Trail, a 53-mile multi-use trail built on an abandoned railroad grade which has its northern terminus at Crookston, Minnesota.

In 2008, Crookston-based Agassiz Energy, LLC, announced that it had postponed indefinitely its plans for a $ 58. 5 million ethanol plant at the junction of the former Great Northern and Soo Line railroads, near the interchange of U. S. Routes 59 and 2.

Tenney is located in the flat basin of prehistoric Lake Agassiz, a glacial lake that existed at the end of the last Ice Age.

The Red River flows across the flat lakebed of the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, an enormous glacial lake created at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation from meltwaters of the Laurentide ice sheet.

His attention was directed to the question of the flow of glaciers in 1840 when he met Louis Agassiz at the Glasgow meeting of the British Association, and in subsequent years he made several visits to Switzerland, where he was particularly impressed by Bernhard Studer's theories, and also to Norway for the purpose of obtaining accurate data.

From 1947 to 1960, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1952, he became Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages.

The iron lung, often referred to in the early days as the " Drinker respirator ", was invented by Phillip Drinker ( 18941972 ) and Louis Agassiz Shaw Junior, professors of industrial hygiene at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Agassiz denied that species originated in single pairs, whether at a single location or at many.

James J. McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, currently chairs the UCS Board of Directors.

Polygeny was supported by thinkers of many backgrounds, such as the zoologist, glaciologist, and geologist Louis Agassiz, and by later thinkers who interpreted Darwin's theory to imply that races evolved at different times or stages.