SKETCH OF CHARLES A. LE SUEUR. 547 



SKETCH OF CHARLES A. LE SUEUR. 



By DAVID STARE JORDAN, 



PRESIDENT OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITT. 



SOME years ago I began to collect material for biographical 

 sketches of several of the early naturalists in America. 

 Among these was Charles A. Le Sueur, the artist, traveler, and 

 naturalist, who was "the first to study the ichthyology of the 

 Great American Lakes." Le Sueur traveled widely in Pennsyl- 

 vania, New York, and New England from 1817 to 1828. He was 

 an artist of high degree, a careful and faithful observer, and ac- 

 cording to accounts, a man of most genial and attractive charac- 

 ter. He had won a high reputation in Europe as an artist. As a 

 naturalist he had been around the world with Pt^ron and La P^- 

 rouse. He was one of the founders of the Academy of Natural 

 Sciences at Philadelphia. When the famous socialistic colony 

 was established by Robert Owen at New Harmony, Ind., Le 

 Sueur was one of its members. He came down from Pittsburg 

 in the famous " boat-load of knowledge " with which the colony 

 was intellectually equipped. 



During his stay at New Harmony, Le Sueur made considerable 

 collections and many drawings, some of which are still preserved, 

 and others have been published in the Journals of the Academy at 

 Philadelphia. A most spirited portrait of the old Governor Vigo 

 is still extant. I have received an account of the drop-curtain 

 painted by Le Sueur for the old theater in New Harmony. On 

 this curtain were represented a rattlesnake and the Falls of Niag- 

 ara, as two natural features most characteristically American. 



After the failure of the New Harmony colony, Le Sueur re- 

 turned to Philadelphia, and probably went from there to Paris, 

 where, according to Swainson, he earned a precarious livelihood 

 as a teacher of painting. For the latter part of his life he was 

 curator of the museum at Havre. His scientific work was done 

 chiefly in America, and it ranked with the best of its kind at the 

 time. Le Sueur's most important memoir was a monograph of 

 the suckers, a group of American fishes constituting his genus 

 Catostomus, each species being represented by a clever and ac- 

 curate figure drawing and engraving being both by the hand of 

 Le Sueur. In 1878 I had occasion to speak of this paper as " an 

 excellent one, comparing favorably with most that has since been 

 written on the group." Other valuable papers were on certain 

 blennies, rays, and flying fishes, accounts of new species from 

 the West Indies, and descriptions of tortoises and other reptiles. 



The Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers contains 

 the titles of nine papers of which Le Sueur was joint author with 



