PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. lOP) 



died in the midst of his labors. Lesueur, inconsolable, was in- 

 duced to take a voyage to the Antilles and the United States to 

 remove the melancholy which oppressed him. He arrived in the 

 United States in 1816 and settled in Philadelphia the following 

 year, where he taught drawing and pursued his studies, being 

 very cordially received by the resident naturalists. After a resi- 

 dence of nine years in Philadelphia, where he was in a situation 

 most congenial to his tastes and useful to science, he was impelled, 

 through a mistaken sense of duty, to join the settlement of 

 Socialists at New Harmony, Indiana. The presence of Mr. Say 

 rendered the new situation endurable for a time, but with his 

 death in 1834 the delusive expectation that human virtue would 

 increase in the ratio that human individuality was stifled faded 

 completely away, and the position was no longer bearable. He 

 departed for New Orleans and for France, where his tastes and 

 acquirements found their opportunity of fruition at Paris, near 

 the Jardin des Plantes, and afterward at Havre, where a museum 

 was established, of which he was appointed curator in 1845. He 

 was attacked by sudden inflammation of the lungs, which carried 

 him off on the I3th of Dec, 1S46, in the 68th year of his age. 



Lesueur was a man of unobtrusive and modest manners and 

 social and amicable disposition. Frugal himself, he was gen- 

 erous to others, even in cases where prudence would justify re- 

 serve. He suffered from robbery, perpetrated under the guise of 

 friendship, yet with the remnant he had left, and the infirmities 

 of age coming upon him, he shared with others whose necessities 

 were greater than his own. 



Lesueur was more of an ichthyologist than a conchologist, but 

 his paper on Firola, in vol. i of the Journal of the Academy of 

 Natural Sciences, was the second paper on mollusks published 

 in the United States and the first on exotic mollusks which 

 appeared here. 



