The correspondence between Louis Agassiz and the French naturalists Georges Cuvier, Lucien Bonaparte and Alexandre Brongniart in the manuscript collections of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle and Institut de France

Louis Agassiz's stay in Paris (1832) and his correspondence with the French naturalists played a major role in his career. Some of this correspondence remains unpublished. This presentation and analysis of Agassiz's correspondence with Cuvier, Brongniart and Bonaparte introduces new biographical information about Agassiz. These letters give us an insight into the origins of Agassiz's ideas on taxonomic categories (species, genus) which left their mark on all his work. The letters show the hitherto unsuspected importance of Agassiz's role in the preparation of Bonaparte's Iconografia della Fauna Italia. A careful study of these letters has enabled us to offer a new interpretation of the correspondence between Agassiz and Cuvier on the subject of the Swiss and German fish collections, now in Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. Lastly, these letters allow us to understand the origin of the descriptions of certain species.