Agassiz, Louis Johann Rudolph, born 1807, eminent naturalist, the son of a Swiss Protestant clergyman. He studied medicine and graduated at Munich, but devoted himself principally to ichthyology, and was employed to classify and arrange the collection brought from Brazil by Martius and Spix. In 1846 he came to America, where he was well received, and accepted the chair of zoology and geology at the University of Cambridge (Harvard College). In 1865 he visited Brazil, and on his return placed the large collection he had made in the museum of Cambridge. He wrote numerous very valuable works, and was to the last a disbeliever in the Darwinian theory of evolution. Died, 1873.

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