John Lawrence LeConte

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. For the naturalist, see

John Lawrence LeConte

Born

May 13, 1825

, New York

Died

November 15, 1883

(aged 58)

, Pennsylvania

Alma mater

Scientific career

Fields

Institutions

Signature

John Lawrence LeConte

MD (May 13, 1825 – November 15, 1883) was an American

, responsible for naming and describing approximately half of the

insect

known in the United States during his lifetime,

including some

5,000 species of beetles. He was recognized as the foremost authority on North

American beetles during his career, and has been described as "the father of

American

Early life

[

]

LeConte in army uniform

A member of the scientifically inclined

LeConte family, John Lawrence was born in

New York City, the son of naturalist

. His mother, Mary A. H.

Lawrence, died when John Lawrence was only a few months old, and he was raised

by his father.

Most reliable sources spell his name "LeConte" or "Leconte",

without the space used by his father, and samples of his signature show the

preference for "LeConte".

He graduated from

, Emmittsburg, Maryland, in 1842,

and from the

, New York, in 1846. He worked

as a chemical assistant to John Torrey and after receiving his medical degree

he briefly practiced medicine. He also married Helen Grier and in the same year he gave up medical practice.

During

the civil war he again worked as a medical inspector and received the rank of lieutenant colonel. Having inherited

enough money to make himself independent, LeConte did not practice medicine professionally.

Influences in his life

included

and

who stayed in the Leconte home.

While still in medical college, in 1844, John Lawrence traveled with his cousin

to the

Starting at

, they visited Detroit and Chicago and traversed Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois

before returning up the

to Pittsburgh and on to New York.

John Lawrence published his first three papers

on beetles that year.

Travels

[

]

After graduating from medical college John Lawrence LeConte made several trips west, including to California via

Panama in 1849. While in

, he sent 10,000 beetles preserved in

back to his father. Another 20,000

beetle specimens were lost in a fire in 1852.

LeConte also traveled to Europe, Egypt and Algiers.

He spent two

years exploring the

, and was in Honduras for the building of the Honduras Interoceanic Railway, and in

Colorado and New Mexico with the party surveying for the

He moved to Philadelphia in 1852,

residing there for the rest of his life. He died in Philadelphia on November 15, 1883.

Military service

[

]

During the American Civil War he enlisted in the

as a surgeon. He was promoted to the position of

medical inspector and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the war.

U.S. Mint

[

]

In 1878 he became the chief clerk (assistant director) of the

in Philadelphia. He retained that

position until his death in 1883.

Scientific societies

[

]

LeConte was active in the scientific societies of his time, with stints as vice-president of the

(1880–1883) and president of the

(1873). He

was a founder of the

, and a charter member of the

Legacy

[

]

LeConte's gravemarker,

The genera

, and

and several hundred

species (mostly beetles) are named after him, including a bird,

(

Toxostoma lecontei

), which he discovered while on a beetle-collecting trip to

, and was named after him by

. LeConte communicated

with and collected birds and other natural history specimens for

, a distant cousin and assistant director and then director of the

for a total of 39

years. In turn Baird asked other naturalists to collect beetles for LeConte.

In the 1850s, LeConte collected some crystals from a cave in Honduras being mined for bat guano.

It was later found to

be a new mineral that was named "

" in his honor.

Works

[

]

English

has

original works by or about:

;

(1853).

. Washington: Smithsonian

Institution.

Catalogue of the Coleoptera of the United States.

(1853)

revised by

and John Lawrence LeConte

Classification of the Coleoptera of North America

(1861, 1873)

New Species of North American Coleoptera

(1866, 1873)

;

(December 1876).

(96):

iii–

xvi,

1–

455.

Classification of the Coleoptera of North America. Part II

(1883) - with

Taxa described by him

[

]

See

Notes

[

]

2001-05-20 at the

- URL retrieved September 14, 2006

Evans, Arthur V., and James N. Hogue. 2004. Chapter 1: A Brief History of Beetle Study in California.

Introduction to

California Beetles

. University of California Press.

, as excerpted at

2006-09-04 at the

- URL retrieved September 16, 2006

June Drenning Holmquist, ed. (1951).

(PDF)

Minnesota

History

(2):

81–

99.

The Coleopterists Bulletin

(4/5):

46–

48. 1947.

Scudder, Samuel H. (1884). "A Biographical Sketch of Dr. John Lawrence LeConte".

Transactions of the American Entomological

Society

(

3–

4):

i–

xxviii.

American Scientific Exploration: 1803-1860

. American Philosophical Society Library Publication.

1991.

Delaware State Journal

. November 22, 1883. p. 4

. Retrieved

January 6,

2021

– via Newspapers.com.

, p. 681.

, p. 246.

Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011).

The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles

. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press. xiii + 296 pp.

. ("Le Conte", page 154).

Taylor, W. J. (1858).

(PDF)

American Journal of Science and Arts

273–

274

. Retrieved

May 2,

2021

References

[

]

Dow, R. P. (1914). "The Greatest Coleopterist".

Journal of the New York Entomological Society

(3):

185–

191.

Essig, E. O. (1931).

. MacMillan Company. pp.

–685.

Horn, George H. (1883).

Science

(46):

783–

786.

Mallis, Arnold (1971).

. Rutgers University Press. pp.

Riley, Charles Valentine (1883).

Psyche: A Journal of

Entomology

(

115–

116):

107–

110.

Scudder, Samuel H. (1886). "Memoir of John Lawrence LeConte 1825-1883".

Biographical Memoirs

. National Academy of

Sciences:

261–

293.

Sorensen, W. Conner (1995).

Brethren of the Net, American Entomology, 1840-1880

. University of Alabama Press.

"John Lawrence LeConte" (1936).

Dictionary of American Biography

, Charles Scribner's Sons.

American Philosophical Society Library

External links

[

]

Media related to

at Wikimedia Commons

Samuel Henshaw (1878)

.:Dimmock's special bibliography. no. 1

Cambridge, Massachusetts, The editor (George Dimmock), 1878.

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This page was last edited on 17 April 2026, at 04:29

(UTC)

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