Alexander AgassizBorn 17 Dec 1835; died 27 Mar 1910 at age 74.Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss marine zoologist, oceanographer and mining engineer who moved to the U.S. in 1849 to join his father, naturalist Jean Louis Agassiz, and studied at Harvard for degrees both in civil engineering (1857) and zoology (1862). Alexander Agassiz made important contributions to systematic zoology, to the knowledge of ocean beds, and to the development of the copper mines of Lake Superior (1866-9). He was curator of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (1873-85), founded by his father. He made numerous oceanographic zoological expeditions, wrote many books and examined thousands of coral reefs to refute Charles Darwin's ideas on atoll formation. |
