This book features Louis Agassiz's seminal lecture course in which the Swiss-American scientist, a self-styled "American Humboldt," summarized the state of zoological knowledge in his time. Though Darwin's theory of evolution would soon dismantle his idealist science, Agassiz's lectures are nonetheless modern in their insistence on the social and cultural importance of the scientific enterprise.

An extensive, well-illustrated introduction by Agassiz's biographer, Christoph Irmscher, situates Agassiz's lectures in the context of his life and nineteenth-century science, while also...