Louis Agassiz letters and portrait, 1854-1858

Louis Agassiz was born in Môtier-en-Vuly, Switzerland. He studied at the universities of Zürich, Erlangen (Ph.D., 1829), Heidelberg, and Munich (M.D., 1830). Although Agassiz had studied medicine, his interest turned to zoology, with a focus in fishes and fossils, studying under the French naturalist Cuvier. In 1832, he became professor of natural history at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. During this period Agassiz published Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles (5 vol. and atlas, 1833-1843), various studies of fossil echinoderms and mollusks, and Étude sur les Glaciers (1840), one of the first descriptions of glacial movements and glacial deposits. Agassiz arrived in the United States in 1846 and accepted a professorship of zoology and geology at Harvard University in 1848. Among his areas of interest were Amazonian ichthyology and deep-sea studies of the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the United States. Agassiz was instrumental in founding the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, in 1860. Agassiz married Cecilie Braun in 1833 and the couple had three children. Remaining in Switzerland when Agassiz came to the U.S. in 1846, Cecilie died in 1848. Aggasiz married Elizabeth Cabot Cary, a naturalist and later co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College, in 1850. Agassiz died in 1873 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Franklin Benjamin Hough (1822-1885) was a physician, author, and chief of the forestry division of the United States Department of Agriculture from 1876 to 1883. In 1854, Hough was superintendent of the 1855 New York State census and an independent researcher and writer.

John Whipple Potter Jenks (1819-1894) was a professor of zoology at the Boston Horticultural Society from 1858 to 1860. Beginning in 1873, Jenks chaired the department of agricultural zoology at Brown University and was curator of the University's museum collections.