68 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



Charles Alexander Lesueur [b. at Havre-de-Grace, France, 

 Jan. i, 1778, d. at Havre, Dec. 12, 1846], the friend and associate 

 of Maclure and Say, accompanied them to New Harmony. The 

 romantic life of this talented Frenchman has been well narrated 

 in his biography by Ord.* He was one of the staff of the Bau- 

 din expedition to Australia in 1800, and to his efforts, seconding 

 those of Peron, his associate, were due most of the scientific 

 results which France obtained from that ill-fated enterprise. 

 Lesueur, though a naturalist of considerable ability, was, above 

 all, an artist. The magnificent plates in the reports prepared by 

 Peron f and Freycinet j were all his. He was called "the 

 Raffaelle of zoological painters," and his removal to America in 

 1815 was greatly deplored by European naturalists. He travelled 

 for three years with Maclure, exploring the West Indies and the 

 eastern United States, making a magnificent collection of draw 

 ings of fishes and invertebrates, and in 1818 settled in Philadel 

 phia, where, supporting himself by giving drawing lessons, he 

 became an active member of the Academy of Sciences, and 

 published many papers in its Journal. 



No one ever drew such exquisite figures of fishes as Lesueur, 

 and it is greatly to be regretted that he never completed his pro 

 jected work upon North American Ichthyology. He issued a 

 prospectus, with specimen plates, of a "Memoir on the Medusae," 

 and his name will always be associated with the earliest American 

 work upon marine invertebrates and invertebrate paleontology, 

 because it was to him that Say undoubtedly owed his first ac 

 quaintance with these departments of zoology. In 1820, while 

 at Albany in the service of the United States and Canadian 

 Boundary Commission, he gave lessons to Eaton and identified 

 his fossils, thus laying the foundations for the future work of 

 the rising school of New York paleontologists. 



* ORD : Memoir of Charles Alexander Lesueur. Am. your. Set'., 2d ser., 

 viii, p. 189. 



t Voyage des Decouvertes aux Terres Australes. 

 t Voyage uux Terres Australes. 



