6 ILLINOIS STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY CIRCULAR 480 



necessitated those considerable changes in his livelihood. Political changes in 

 Switzerland led to Lesquereux's emigration to the United States in 1847. His first 

 employment in the United States was with Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist, 

 and involved the taxonomy of living plants from a Lake Superior expedition. In 

 1848 Lesquereux made Columbus, Ohio, his permanent home, and there he shared 

 bryological research with the wealthy and noted American bryologist, William S. 

 Sullivant. Lesquereux had become well known as a bryologist before his paleo- 

 botanical activities began in 1850, when he was 44 (Rodgers, 1940) . 



His studies of fossil plants from Illinois were published in 1866 and 1870 

 by the Geological Survey of Illinois. Lesquereux later used the studies of fossils 

 from Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and much additional data in his three-volume 

 work and atlas, Description of the Coal Flora of the Carboniferous Formation in 

 Pennsylvania and Throughout the United States (1879, 1880a,b, 1884). Lesquer- 

 eux's extensive studies of the Carboniferous floras and those from other geologic 

 periods formed the foundation for North American paleobotany. Rodgers (1944) has 

 recounted Lesquereux's paleobotanical activities in the United States. 



The Illinois Collection 



The Illinois State collection of fossil plants, gathered by Worthen and 

 classified by Lesquereux, was damaged by fire in 1871 (Am. Jour. Science, 1871). 

 Springfield newspapers (111. State Jour., 1871; 111. State Register, 1871) reported 

 that Worthen' s private collection was safely removed by his son, who was in the 

 second floor office at the time of the fire, but the likelihood of the collapse of 

 the building prevented removal of the State collection. 



Some type specimens from Lesquereux's studies are now scattered among 

 the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, the U.S. National Museum of Natural 

 History in Washington, D. C, the University of Illinois in Urbana, Harvard 

 University, Yale University, the Geological Survey of Alabama, and probably also 

 Princeton University (oral communication, Erling Dorf) . There are no doubt other 

 locations as well, because Lesquereux gave no clues to the repositories of cer- 

 tain plant specimens, and his type specimens were moved about and exchanged 

 quite frequently. In 1912, A. R. Crook, curator of the Illinois State Museum in 

 Springfield, published a short catalog of the plant fossils in the museum collec- 

 tion, in which he identified some of Lesquereux's type specimens for the first time 

 since their description. 



R. E. Janssen identified and revised some of the Lesquereux type speci- 

 mens in the mid-1 930s. Janssen explained the genesis of the project to us: 



... Dr. Noe had been contacted by the Illinois State Museum director to 

 suggest someone who could evaluate and classify a collection of plant fos- 

 sils that had been discovered in storage during the museum's move to a new 

 building. He recommended me for the Job, and during its progress I recog- 

 nized many of Lesquereux's type specimens which had long since been con- 

 sidered lost. 



Janssen' s paper was published by the museum in 1940 (Janssen, 1940b). 



The history of the curating and some locations of Lesquereux's types were 

 given by Sarton (1942) and Darrah (1969). Arthur D. Watt of the U.S. Geological 

 Survey is now conducting a further search for the types, with the intention of pub- 

 lishing a catalog. He has already published a list of some of the Lesquereux 



