Louis Agassiz

Agassiz arrived in Boston in 1846 to deliver lectures, was offered a Harvard professorship the following year, and never returned to Europe. His Swiss work on glaciation — the recognition that Europe had once been covered by ice sheets — was foundational geological science, and he extended that work across North America in the 1850s. In 1859 he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, still one of the great American natural-history institutions. His legacy is genuinely divided. He was a brilliant teacher and a giant of nineteenth-century science. He was also a vocal opponent of Darwinian evolution and a polygenist whose writings on race were used to justify slavery and were rightly discredited within a generation. A serious record holds both facts.