Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873), a Swiss-American naturalist, was an outstanding comparative anatomist. He promulgated the glacial theory and opposed Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Paleontology was just beginning to emerge as a science during Agassiz's time; speculations about the distribution of species and their relationships to each other were becoming a major preoccupation of naturalists, and science was taking on an increasingly important place in the curricula of educational institutions. Agassiz played an important role in all these developments, both in Europe and in America.

Louis Agassiz was born at Môtier-en-Vuly in French Switzerland on May 28, 1807. His father, the last of a line of seven Protestant clergymen, instilled in Louis the religious qualities that marked his life, and his mother, Rose Mayor Agassiz, encouraged the precocious taste for science that led him to neglect his books in order to collect a huge assortment...