Solothurn, Jent & Gassmann, 1840-1841; Neuchatel, H. Nicolet, 1840. Text: 8vo (21.5 x 14.2 cm). xii, 326, [i] pp. 19th-century pebbled half cloth over marbled boards. Spine with gilt ornamental bands and title. Greenish endpapers. Subtly marbled edges. Atlas: Oblong folio (29.7 x 44.0 cm). 18 lithographed plates of which 14 with printed overlays (as intended). Contemporary green quarter calf over green boards. Spine with gilt bands. Original pictorial title mounted on front board.

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873), known as Louis, was - with this work - the founder of glacial geology. Alexander von Humboldt and Georges Cuvier launched him on his careers of respectively geology and zoology (Wikipedia). He was a professor of natural history at the university of Neuchâtel and president of the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences before he went to the U.S.A. in 1846, where he became a professor at Harvard. He played a major role in the founding of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the National Academy of Sciences. In 1863 he was appointed a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1837, Agassiz proposed that the Earth had been subjected to a past ice age. He presented the theory to the Helvetic Society that ancient glaciers flowed outward from the Alps, and even larger glaciers had covered the plains and mountains of Europe, Asia, and North America and smothered the entire Northern Hemisphere in a prolonged ice age. The Untersuchungen über die Gletscher, or Etudes sur les Glaciers - which was published a few months earlier - is Agassiz' most famous and most sought-after work, and the first in-depth study of glaciers. Agassiz Glacier, in Glacier National Park, Montana, is named after him. This is a complete set of the text and the atlas volume. Text volume with simple, small stamp of a former private owner, the Swedish geologist Baron Gerard Jacob De Geer (1858-1943) on the front pastedown; a few pencilled markings, otherwise a very good, clean copy. Atlas with a few pencilled markings, some minimal spotting (far less than in any other copy we have seen); otherwise a very good, clean copy. Dibner 98; DSB I, pp. 72-74; Horblit, 1; PMM 309 (French edition); Ward and Carozzi, 24.