Arnold Henry Guyot

Geographer, born in Boudevilliers, W Switzerland. He studied at Neuchâtel and in Germany, became professor of geology at Neuchâtel (1839), and studied glaciers in Switzerland with Jean Louis Agassiz. In 1848 he emigrated to the USA, and became professor of physical geography and geology at Princeton (1854), and was in charge of the meteorological department of the Smithsonian Institution. His name is preserved in the geological term guyot, a flat-topped sub-ocean mountain.

Arnold Henry Guyot (September 28, 1807 – February 8, 1884), Swiss-American geologist and geographer, was born at Boudevilliers, near Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

He studied at the college of Neuchâtel and in Germany, where he began a lifelong friendship with Louis Agassiz. He was professor of history and physical geography at the short-lived Neuchâtel Academy from 1839 to 1848, when he removed, at Agassiz's instance, to the United States, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He ranked high as a geologist and meteorologist. As early as 1838, he undertook, at Agassiz's suggestion, the study of glaciers, and was the first to announce, in a paper submitted to the Geological Society of France, certain important observations relating to glacial motion and structure.

His extensive meteorological observations in America led to the establishment of the United States Weather Bureau, and his Meteorological and Physical Tables (1852, revised ed. In addition to text-books, his principal publications were:

Earth and Man, Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography in its Relation to the History of Mankind (translated by Professor CC Felton, 1849) A Memoir of Louis Agassiz (1883) Creation, or the Biblical Cosmogony in the Light of Modern Science (1884).

He is the namesake of the Guyot Glacier in Alaska, Mount Guyot in Tennessee, and a different Mount Guyot in New Hampshire.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.