LESQUEREUX, LEo(1806-89). An American botaniq, born at Fleuricr, Switzerland, of French Huguenot ancestry. After several years at the academy of Neuehntel, he went to Eisenach as a teacher of French. Upon his return to Swit zerland he became principal in a school at La Chaux de Fonds, but, owing to deafness, he had to give up teaching. Ilis 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. Tn 1848 he went to the United Status, lived with Agassiz at Cambridge for a time, and then became the assistant of William S. Sulli vant. The two, after expeditions into the moun tains of the South, published Musei .Inzerieani Exsiecati (185(1) and /cones I/anal•um (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 (ISSO), is the most important work in this field. He also wrote: Contributions to the Fos sil Flora of the Western Territories (1874-S3) : The Flora of the Dakota Group, edited by F. H. Knowlton (1S91) ; 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.