Agassiz continued to find evidence for his ice age hypothesis when he traveled to North America in 1846. He was welcomed warmly in America, and was soon put in charge of building the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, where he also assumed a professorship (Duffin, 2007). The museum opened in 1860, and had the distinction of being the first publicly funded museum of science in North America (Berkeley). Agassiz worked tirelessly to promote scientific education in the United States. In 1863, he was a founding member of the new National Academy of Sciences, and in the same year was appointed a regent of the Smithsonian Institution (Ibid.).

In 1873, just a few months before his death, Agassiz founded the first American marine biology laboratory on the island of Penikese in Massachusetts. The primary goal of the laboratory was two-fold: to be a venue for new research, and, more importantly...
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