Lesley.] "O [March 21, 



animated mmuer with his friend just now, and he seemed to hear him as 

 well as you or I could." 



With those who wore beards it was more difficult, and he was obliged 

 to beg a repetition of m my sentences. Bat with most persons he car- 

 ried on conversation ia writing, always carrying tablets and pencils with 

 him for that use. Experience had also taught him to gather up all the 

 loose papers on which there were any sentences of the conversation, and 

 throw them into the fire before he left the room, or tear them to pieces if 

 in the open air. So expert was he in interpreting what was said to him, 

 that he usually gathered the whole of a sentence by watching the first 

 few words of it written. He seldom permitted the sentence to be finished. 

 I suppose this quickness was not a mere consequence of his intellectual 

 cultivation, but was one of the many necessities he felt for diminishing 

 what he considered the burden which his infirmity laid on his interlocu- 

 tors ; he was so delicately generous to others ; and making no distinction 

 at all between the highest and lowest class of man. 



Lesquereux took no part in politics. I think they did not interest him. 

 His friend, Agassiz, was a born aristocrat. His friend, Desor, was a demo- 

 crat of the most pronounced type, and continued to be one of the two 

 most, influential leaders of the Democratic party in the Canton, after the 

 not bloodless revolution which made Neufchatel free of Prussia, until his 

 death in 1886. But Lesquereux's letters to me through nearly thirty 

 years scarcely mentioned the political situations on either side of the 

 Atlantic ; with one exception ; he deeply sympathized witli the preserva- 

 tion of the Union, and the emancipation of the slaves. 



Lesquereux's religious opinions, if he had any, are unknown to me. 

 But I have innumerable evidences in his letters that he entertained a very 

 remarkable faith in an Overruling Providence, as fixed as it was simple. 

 "I have known what it was to have no bread for my family," he writes 

 in one of his letters, "but the good God has never forsaken me." I am 

 reminded that I compared him to Heinrich Stilling, after reading one of 

 his cheery pages, in reply to some desponding confidences of my own less 

 sure faith. I am sure that not a complaining expression can be found in 

 our long correspondence. 



I first met Lesquereux in Schuylkill county, Pa., in the summer of 1851. 

 Prof. H. D. Rogers was revising the Anthracite region for his Final Re- 

 port. Desor, who had worked with Agassiz in Boston and on Lake Su- 

 perior, had accepted an offer to study the surface deposits of Pennsylva 

 nia ; and Lesquereux, who was employed to provide a report on the Coal 

 plants of the State, sat day after day on the Anthracite tip-heaps, collect- 

 ing and classifying whatever the roof shales afforded him. His names, 

 descriptions and figures were published seven years later (18o8) in the 

 Second Volume of the Geology of Pennsylvania. 

 His " Fossil Coal Flora of Arkansas " was published in 1860. 

 His "Fossil Coal Plants of Illinois" appeared in Worthen's Second and 

 Fourth Volumes in 1866, 1880. 



