Born in Switzerland, Louis Agassiz (1807-73) distinguished himself as one of the most capable and industrious naturalists of the nineteenth century, working in fields as diverse as ichthyology and glaciology. In the late 1840s, he moved to North America, where he became a professor of zoology at Harvard and established the Museum of Comparative Zoology. His extensive bibliography of all known works relating to zoology and geology, which he had compiled for private use, was revised and substantially expanded by the English naturalist Hugh Edwin Strickland (1811-53) and published by the Ray Society in four volumes between 1848 and 1854. As such, it stands as the fullest record of the existing scientific literature just prior to the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Volume 4 (1854), completed by Sir William Jardine (1800-74) after the death of Strickland, concludes the list of works, arranged alphabetically by author, ranging here from Naccari to Zwinger.
