The New International Encyclopædia/Lesquereux, Leo

LESQUEREUX, lā̇′ke-rẽ′, Leo (1806-89). An American botanist, born at Fleurier, Switzerland, of French Huguenot ancestry. After several years at the academy of Neuchâtel, he went to Eisenach as a teacher of French. Upon his return to Switzerland he became principal in a school at La Chaux de Fonds, but, owing to deafness, he had to give up teaching. His old love of plants led him to study botany as opportunity came, and he published a catalogue of mosses, and later won a prize for a treatise on peat-bogs. These monographs won him the friendship of Louis Agassiz, and enabled him to travel over Northern Europe studying the formation of peat and of coal. In 1848 he went to the United States, lived with Agassiz at Cambridge for a time, and then became the assistant of William S. Sullivant. The two, after expeditions into the mountains of the South, published Museci Americani Exsiccati (1856) and Icones Muscarum (1864). Afterwards Lesquereux again took up his study of coal formation, traveled in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas, and worked on the geological surveys of these States. Among his reports the “Catalogue of the Fossil Plants which have been named or described from the Coal Measures of North America,” the first and the second reports of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey (1880), is the most important work in this field. He also wrote: Contributions to the Fossil Flora of the Western Territories (1874-83); The Flora of the Dakota Group, edited by V. H. Knowlton (1891); and, with Thomas P. James, the continuation of Sullivant's work, Manual of the Mosses of North America (1884). He became entirely deaf in middle life, but was an expert lip-reader.