Eesiccati Americana which underwent several editions, 
the last in 1865. Lesquereux also wrote practically the 
entire Latin text for Sullivant’s [cones Muscorum. 
Upon the sudden death of Sullivant, all his exten- 
sive collections and library were deposited in Harvard 
University, and at the urgent request of Professor Asa 
Gray, Lesquereux was invited by his old colleague, Pro- 
fessor Agassiz, to come to Harvard to complete the pro- 
posed Manual of North American Mosses. This he agreed 
to do serving a portion of each year. Lesquereux worked 
diligently but his sight began failing him so that by 1872 
he was unable to do close work. Fortunately Professor 
Thomas P. James was engaged to complete the com- 
paratively few remaining microscopic determinations, but 
his untimely death again delayed the work until 1884 
when it was finally published as the Manual of North 
American Mosses. Wt is still a useful as well a classic 
memoir. 
Should Lesquereux have accomplished little else 
he would have earned a lasting place in the history of 
American botany. Yet this was the lesser side of his sci- 
entific attainments. He has been titled the Nestor of 
American Paleobotany. It was Lesquereux who gave to 
the collection of fossil plants in the Botanical Museum 
a status unique in the whole world. It is the type Ameri- 
can collection, the actual basis for the study of all Ameri- 
‘an fossil floras. No other museum in the world can boast 
of possessing all the original and fundamental floras ac- 
cumulated in the first thirty years of its country’s paleo- 
botanic research. Lesquereux published his first paper on 
fossil plants in 1854, (Journ. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist. vol. 6) 
when he described as new, 110 species of Carboniferous 
plants mostly from the Anthracite Coal Fields of Penn- 
sylvania. ‘This was tollowed by a more extensive survey 
of the Coal Flora in 1858 in Professor H. D. Rogers’ 
[125 | 
