Charismatic and controversial, Louis Agassiz is our least known revolutionary-some fifty years after American independence, he became a founding father of American science. One hundred and seventy-five years ago, a Swiss immigrant took America by storm, launching American science as we know it. The irrepressible Louis Agassiz, legendary at a young age for his work on mountain glaciers, focused his prodigious energies on the fauna of the New World....