Agassiz was a Swiss geologist, a charismatic bear of a man with bushy mutton chops, who had earned his fame by being one of the earliest proponents of the ice age theory. Agassiz had only come to this vision of an earth coated in ice after making meticulous observations of fossils and scratch marks in the bedrock. As a result, he believed that the best way to teach science was to scrutinize nature. “Study nature, not books” was his motto, and he was known for locking his students in a closet with dead animals and not allowing them to emerge until they had discovered “all the truths which the
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