The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Guyot, Arnold

GUYOT, gē'ō, Arnold, American geographer: b. Boudevilliers, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 28 Sept. 1807; d. Princeton, N. J., 8 Feb. 1884. He was educated at Chaux-de-Fonds, and then at the College de Neuchâtel. In 1825 he went to Germany, and resided in Karlsruhe where he met Louis Agassiz. Thence he moved to Stuttgart, where he studied at the gymnasium, returning to Neuchâtel in 1827. He determined to enter the ministry and started for Berlin to attend lectures at the university. While pursuing his studies he also attended lectures on philosophy and natural science. His leisure was spent in collecting shells and plants and from Humbolt he received an entrée to the Berlin botanical garden. In 1835 he received the degree of Ph.D. from Berlin, and spent the ensuing four years as a tutor in Paris. In 1838 he visited the Swiss glaciers and communicated the results of his six weeks' investigation to the Geological Society of France. He was the first to point out the laminated structure of ice in the glaciers. In 1839 he became the colleague of Agassiz as professor of history and physical geography at the College of Neuchâtel. The suspension of the institution in 1848 caused Guyot to emigrate to America, where he settled in Cambridge. He delivered a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute which were afterward published as ‘Earth and Man’ (Boston 1853). The Massachusetts board of education retained his services as lecturer on geography and methods of instruction to the normal schools and teachers' institutes. He was occupied with this work until his appointment, in 1854, to the chair of physical geography and geology at Princeton, which he retained until his death. He was also for several years lecturer on physical geography in the State Normal School in Trenton, N. J., and from 1861 to 1866 lecturer in the Princeton Theological Seminary. He also gave courses in the Union Theological Seminary New York, and at Columbia College. He founded the museum at Princeton, many of the specimens of which are from his own collections. His scientific work in the United States included the perfection of plans for a national system of meteorological observations. Most of these were conducted under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. The selection and establishment of numerous meteorological stations in New York and Massachusetts were confided to him. He was a member of many American and foreign scientific societies. He prepared a series of geographies and wall maps in 1866-75, for which he was awarded a medal at Vienna in 1873. He was one of the editors of ‘Johnson's New Universal Cyclopædia’; wrote memoirs of Carl Ritter (1860); James H. Coffin (1875) and Louis Agassiz (1883); also ‘Treatise on Physical Geography’ (1873), Consult memoir by J. A. Dana in ‘Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences’ (Washington 1886).