Lake Superior, Its Physical Character, Vegetation, and Animals (inscribed to Rev. Zadock Thompson, Vermont naturalist)
Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1850. First edition. Hardcover. A great association copy, inscribed at the top of the front free endpaper: "Rev. Z. Thompson, with the respect of L Agassiz." A scarce signature. "R.L. Agassiz" is written below in another hand (we note that his grandson was the prominent Roldolphe Louis Agassiz). Zadock Thompson (1769-1856) was a naturalist, professor, and Episcopal priest in Vermont, best known for his "magisterial" three-volume History of the State of Vermont, Natural, Civil and Statistical (1842), which includes detailed descriptions of the state's flora and fauna, climate, water, geology, and more. In it he also expresses an early conservation ethic and ecological understanding, noting the loss of passenger pigeons, predators, and "nuisance species." “We have even paid a bounty for the destruction of crows,” he wrote, for example, “while in consequence of that destruction our fields were suffering from the ravages of grubs, which the crows are designed to check.” He helped found and establish the collections of the College of Natural History at the University of Vermont in 1826. See this Vermont Digger article for more on his fascinating and accomplished life. Zadock and Agassiz were colleagues; famously Zadock identified a fossilized beluga whale in Vermont (the "Charlotte Whale"), which argued for a prehistoric sea, and he conferred with Agassiz about this find and sent him other specimens, including mammoth bones and especially fish from Lake Champlain. Agassiz credits Zadock's contributions in his monumental, four-volume Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (1857-1862).
This earlier book makes for a fitting association in particular because Agassiz and Zadock were sharing information and creatures from the Great Lakes. Lake Superior reports on the expedition Agassiz led to its northern shores in 1848 (energized by his new continent and appointment at Harvard), which was the first detailed scientific study of that region's natural history. He brought along a group of nine students and colleagues--this was early field learning in America--as well as the artist-intellectual James Elliot Cabot, who provides the plates and narrative for this book in its first third. Agassiz reports on the geology and zoology in the rest. The group collected and explored during the day and Agassiz would teach along the way, as his wife, collaborator, and biographer, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, recalls in Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence: "At evening, around the camp-fire, or when delayed by weather or untoward circumstances, he would give to his companions short and informal lectures, it might be on the forest about them, or on the erratic phenomena in the immediate neighborhood,—on the terraces of the lake shore, or on the fish of its waters. His lecture-room, in short, was everywhere; his apparatus a traveling blackboard and a bit of chalk; while his illustrations and specimens lay all around him, wherever the party chanced to be" (Chapter 15). The expedition also furthered his important thinking on glaciology as he observed clear striations and erratics in the region and wrote about them in the chapter "The Erratic Phenomena about Lake Superior.” Based on his similar observations in Europe, Agassiz was the first to argue that the earth as a whole had experienced an ice age.
Agassiz was Swiss-born and studied with George Cuvier and Alexander van Humboldt in Paris and is best known for his study of fish and their fossils as well as the founding of glaciology. Already in 1840s among the world's most famous and influential scientists, amid instability in Europe in 1848 he was convinced to take up an endowed professorship at Harvard in the new Lawrence Scientific School, with the promise that he could start his own museum to build the specimen collections he felt were essential to teaching and study. This would become the renown Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard, where the likes of Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson in more recent years made their careers. Originally Agassiz's collections were housed in a shack on a pier above the Charles River, an old boathouse, and the Museum was formally founded in 1859. He voraciously built its collections, and Henry David Thoreau among many others brought and sent him specimens.
Agassiz is considered a "founding father" of American science both through his work at Harvard and his founding role in the National Academy of Sciences, and he was arguably the most famous/popular scientist in America when he died in 1873, though within scientific circles his star had fallen because of his steadfast creationist views. As this UC Berkeley biography puts its, "The cornerstone of Agassiz's biological thought was his belief that the gradation from low to high forms, in any taxon, paralleled the order of appearance in the fossil record, the order of stages in the organisms' development, and the distribution and ecology of the taxon." Agassiz famously did not come around to Darwin's theory and was his primary foil in America (while Asa Gray, Agassiz's colleague in botany at Harvard, was Darwin's great champion). Among those Agassiz trained are Alpheus Hyatt, William Healey Dall, David Starr Jordan, Nathaniel Shaler, and Edward S. Morse.
A large octavo, brown cloth boards with gilt to spine. Rebacked with the original spine laid down and hinges reinforced. Sixteen lithographic plates with tissue guards: scenes of the trip from the drawings of Cabot in the narrative, and plates of specimens following Agassiz's descriptions. Publishers ads at rears, including one for Agassiz's foundational textbook The Principles of Zoology, published the same year, on the final page. A very good copy with rubbing through cloth to board edges and corners. One crease to cloth at upper corner of front board, and half-inch diameter tear/scuff to cloth on rear board. Toning to pages and occasional foxing. A wonderful association and scarce signed by Agassiz. Very good. Item #2202
Price: $15,000.00 save 5% $14,250.00