Who is Louis Agassiz from The Mismeasure of Man and what is their importance?

Agassiz was the American proponent of polygeny. Originally from Switzerland, he came to America in the 1840s and taught at Harvard. He opposed slavery and developed a theory based on centers of creation and that species did not go far from their center. He did not support the social equality of blacks but did believe in legal equality. In the last years of his life, his students and other scientists began to question and shun him, although he remained popular with the public. Agassiz was basically the theorist of the biological determinism movement in America.