A Biographical Sketch of Dr. John Lawrence LeGonte. 



BY SAMUEL H. SCUDDER.* 



The revocation of the edict of Nantes, with its* attendant persecutions 

 and other horrors, was incidentally of advantage to science, for of the 

 tens of thousands who expatriated themselves from a community given 

 over to tyranny and fanaticism, not a few carried with them and trans- 

 mitted to their offspring, born in the land- of refuge, a spirit of scientific 

 investigation, which was doubtless quickened by the intense life of the 

 time ; and in after years, when the hereditary trait again appeared, it 

 may often have found its healthy growth re-enforced by the admixture 

 of the new element afforded by residence in a foreign country. At all 

 events other countries owe much of their scientific fame to the men of 

 Huguenot ancestry, who fled from the intolerance of Louis XIV, and 

 whose influence outside of France would but for this have certainly been 

 lessened for lack of direct contact, for among the Huguenots, or their 

 descendants, as has frequently been pointed out, was an unusual propor- 

 tion of men devoted to science, literature and the arts. Thus, to men- 

 tion but a few names, Switzerland owes to this movement her DeCandolles 

 and Saussures, with Plantamour and a host of lesser lights ; Germany 

 and Holland, Charpentier and Lyonet; England, her Herschels; and our 

 own country, Bowdoin, of Cambridge, an early president of the American 

 Academy, John Jay, of New York, and the LeContes, living and dead. 



The name of LeConte, or LeComte as it was indifferently spelled, was 

 a frequent one to France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and 

 particularly in Normandy. The families were mostly of noble blood, and 

 many were possessed of considerable estates ; others, however, were born 

 in poverty, of whom some came to a more honoroble distinction than 

 wealth than title could give, — such as the learned Antoine LeConte, a 

 jurist of Noyon, famous for his attacks on Calvin ; or the other Antoine, 

 possibly a direct descendant, who was baron de I'Echelle, and governor 

 of Sedan, and was well known in Huguenot times for his controversial 

 letters addressed to a Jesuit ; but whether of noble or plebian blood we 

 rarely find their names in those days, excepting as stanch Huguenots, 

 and without leaving Normandy we come to such cases as that of Isaac 



* Rfad bcfoiv tlie X;itioual Aoadeiuy of Science, April 17, 1884. 



(1) AUGUST, 1SS4. 



