Leo Lesquereux

Charles Léo Lesquereux (November 18, 1806 – October 25, 1889) was a Swiss and immigrant American bryologist, pioneer of American paleobotany, and leading expert on peat bogs. He was elected in 1861 to the American Philosophical Society and in 1864 to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Quotes

The country west of the Missouri, and to the base of the Rocky Mountains, is for nearly six hundred miles—as from Omaha to Cheyenne, or from Kansas City to Denver—a vast plain, with a gradual slope, unappreciable to the eyes, and which generally, without breaking the stratification by upheavals or denudations, expose to view the rocks composing the crust of the land surface. The ascending grade from the Missouri River toward the mountains does not average more than ten feet per mile, and as the Cretaceous strata exposed below Omaha above the Permian Measures, are nearly horizontal, they pass, of course, toward the west under the different stages of the Tertiary or under more recent deposits.
- Contributions to the Fossil Flora of the Western Territories: The tertiary flora, Volume 2. Volume 7 of Report of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1878. p. 3. (366 pages)

Marine Plants, or Thalassophytes.
These plants, generally composed, like the Fungi, of soft cellular tissue, have rarely been preserved in a fossil state. Even at the present time, and though the shallow shores of the sea are inhabited by a luxuriant vegetation of Fucus, and covered by heaps of their remains thrown out by the waves; though on some parts of the ocean, and far from any land, the surface of the sea is covered by a vegetation those marine plants (Sargassum), whose branches and filaments are so thickly interwoven, that they sometimes became impassible to ships; though also in the cold regions of both Arctic and Antarctic oceans, species of Algae are found of immense stature, either of a prodigious length, or of a thickness equaling that of the trunks of large trees,—remains of marine plants are scarcely, if ever, found imbedded, in a state of preservation, either in sand, in clay, or in any other compound, where woody plants remain unimpaired and preserved with their normal shape
- Description of the Coal Flora of the Carboniferous Formation in Pennsylvania and Throughout the United States. Volumes 1-2 of Description of the Coal Flora of the Carboniferous Formation in Pennsylvania and Throughout the United States; Report of progress, Pennsylvania 2nd Geological Survey. Board of Commissioners for the Second Geological Survey. 1880. p. 4. (977 pages)

In the Vosges he encountered the celebrated botanist Mougeot, whom he had twice guided to the top of the Chasseron. Now, Mougeot returned the favor by driving him to the Hohnecke, the highest summit of the Vosges, covered with fog and drenched in rain.
The impression produced on Lesquereux's mind by the greatest European collection of fossil plants at that time, in the Museum of Strassburg, was never effaced: He says : " I felt as if I had been transported into another world, and could scarcely leave the large room where the specimens were exposed. I said to Schimper, how happy a man should be with such an admirable vegetation to study! I did not dare to ask him for even a small piece of one specimen, although I should have prized the smallest as a treasure. Was it a remembrance of some former life, or a pre-vision of what was to come to me in the hereafter? "
- J. Peter Lesley, "Memoir of Leo Lesquereux, 1806-1889, read before the National Academy, April 16, 1890". Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 3. 1895. pp. 189–212. (quote from pp. 205–206)