Principles of Zoology, Part I, Comparative Physiology (inscribed by Agassiz to Edward Everett, president of Harvard)

An important association copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper, very likely in the year of publication: "To President Ed. Everett, with the high regard of Louis Agassiz." A scarce signature. Edward Everett was until December of 1948 the president of Harvard, where he established the Lawrence Scientific School and recruited Agassiz, already then among the world's most famous and influential scientists, from Switzerland. Everett had begun his career as an influential teacher at Harvard, but left teaching for politics, and his return to Harvard for 2.5 years was an interlude. He would go on to serve as Secretary of State under President Fillmore and then a U.S. Senator for Massachusetts, and throughout his career he was considered among the finest orators in the nation, as evidenced by the fact that he was picked to deliver the main address at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery in 1863. (He spoke for two hours, but of course his address was ultimately overshadowed by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; he said afterward to Lincoln, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes"). Everett graduated from Harvard at just 17 on rockstar trajectory. Only two years later he was given the ministry at the famous Brattle Street Church, becoming a popular Unitarin preacher. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was highly influenced by Everett, first heard him at the church, writing that his voice "was of such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct of all instruments of the time." Among other notables, Emerson was then his student at Harvard, where Everett taught from 1819 to 1824 as a professor of Greek Literature (after Harvard first funded his travel in Europe for two years) until he was elected to the US House following an impressive speech on American Literature (of all things). After 10 years in the House, he became the Governor of Massachusetts then a diplomat, before he circled back around to Harvard. It was Everett who recruited Agassiz to Harvard. Agassiz had been lecturing in Boston in 1846 amid instability in Europe, and he was convinced to take up an endowed professorship at Harvard funded by Abbott Lawrence, who the scientific school was named after, with the promise that he could start his own museum to build the specimen collections he felt were essential to teaching and study. This would become the renown Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard, where the likes of Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson in more recent years made their careers. Originally Agassiz's collections were housed in a shack on a pier above the Charles River, an old boathouse, and the Museum was formally founded in 1859. He voraciously built its collections, and Henry David Thoreau among many others brought and sent him specimens. Principles of Zoology was Agassiz's first book published in America and it became a foundational textbook, with many editions published. A Part II was intended, but it did not come to fruition, as his wife and biographer, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, explains in Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence: "[Principles of Zoology, Part I] had a large sale, especially for schools. Edition followed edition, but the sale of the first part was checked by the want of the second, which was never printed. Agassiz was always swept along so rapidly by the current of his own activity that he was sometimes forced to leave behind him unfinished work. Before the time came for the completion of the second part of the zoology, his own knowledge had matured so much, that to be true to the facts, he must have remodeled the whole of the first part, and for this he never found the time." As the preface of the book states, "the design of this work is to furnish an epitome of the leading principles of the science of Zoology . so illustrated as to be intelligib.…