272 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



of the northern part of our hemisphere, and in the volumin- 

 ous literature which has recorded the rapid progress of 

 this department of geology. 



Jean Louis Eodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873) was born in 

 Switzerland, and rose to distinction by his scientific work 

 in Europe, but he went to the United States when he was 

 still only forty-two years of age, and spent the last twenty- 

 seven years of his life as an energetic and successful leader 

 of science in his adopted home. His fame is thus both 

 European and American, and the geologists of New England, 

 not less than those of Switzerland, may claim him as one 

 of their most distinguished worthies. 



We must pass over the brilliant researches into the his- 

 tory of fossil fishes which placed the name of Agassiz high 

 among the paleontologists of Europe when he was still a 

 young man. What we are more particularly concerned 

 with here is the share he had in founding the modern 

 school of glacial geology. As far back as the summer of 

 1837, when he was only thirty-three years of age, Agassiz, 

 as President of the Helvetian Society of Natural Science, 

 struck, with the hand of a master, the keynote of all his 

 future research in glaciation. Tracing the distribution of 

 the erratic blocks above the present level of the glaciers, 

 and far beyond their existing limits, he connected these 

 transported masses with the polished and striated rock- 

 surfaces which were known to extend even to the summits 

 of the southern slopes of the Jura. He showed, from the 

 nature of these smoothed surfaces, that they could not 

 have been worn into their characteristic forms by any 

 current of water. The fine striae, engraven on them as 

 with a diamond-point, he proved to be precisely similar 



