ABSTRACT
Imagine being born in the early 1800s in rural Switzerland and being home schooled by your parents until the age of 10. Continue to imagine that your parents encouraged you to explore the area around your home and collect birds, fi shes, and small mammals and keep them for study. You learned how to hunt, trap, fi sh, boat, and hike in the area and you loved being outdoors discovering nature’s secrets. Th at’s how the life of Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (pronounced AG-a-see) began aft er his birth in Motier, Switzerland, in 1807. Louis (as he was usually called by family and friends) grew up with his brother, Auguste, and sisters, Olympe and Cecile, exploring the surrounding waters, mountains, and glaciers and satisfying his thirst for knowledge about natural history. His enthusiasm for learning about nature was extraordinary. He was later considered to be “an illustrious savant” and “the originator and source of so many new ideas” by Alexander von Humboldt, one of the leading scientists of the day. As a youth he said, “My highest ambition was to be able to designate the plants and animals of my native country correctly by Latin name, and to extend gradually a similar knowledge in its application to the productions of other countries” (Agassiz in Lurie, 1988, p. 9). As a youth he was especially interested in fi sh, rocks, minerals, fossils, and plants.
