| SECOND GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF PENNSYLVANIA - REPORT OF PROGRESS P. DESCRIPTION OF THE COAL FLORA OF PENNSYLVANIA AND OF THE CARBONIFEROUS FORMATION THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES BY LEO LESQUEREUX; ©1879 |
| All Four Volumes: Scans and Webpage ©George Langford III, 2011 |
| When my grandfather, George Langford, was salvaging fossil-bearing nodules from the Mazon Creek deposits on the strip mine spoil heaps in Wilmington, Illinois, he depended for identifications in large part on this book by Leo Lesquereux, whose efforts to find and identify plant fossils in the coal-bearing strata had been monumental a half-century earlier. Grandfather's two volumes on the Mazon Creek fossils, published by the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI) have also become classics, on which many amateur paleontologists depend because of their relatively easy availability and clarity. On another page in georgesbasement I have published a catalog prepared by George, Senior, for his son George, Junior, who had helped out in a big way over a period of many years, finding and cracking nodules side-by-side with his father. |
| Leo Lesquereux's work was published in three parts, the first of which carried the scientific descriptions of the fossil flora in Volume I and Volume II, bound together. An Atlas carries over one hundred plates, hand-drawn renditions of the actual fossiliferous rocks. Finally, Volume III carries additional scientific descriptions and corrections, along with tabular data about the stratigraphical distribution of the flora, about the specific flora found at the many locations, and about the fossils found at a great many localities. The book starts here. |
All
the plates and text on the ca. thousand-pages were digitized by me from
the original volumes, and the text was extracted by optical character
recognition by a commercial program named OmniPage 15. I cleaned up the plates (spotted with age stains) as well as I could with Adobe Photoshop Elements, and I corrected the obvious textual errors where I could do so. Please advise by email at this address  if you find anything that isn't faithful to Lesquereux's intent; I have no paleontological training.George Langford, III, editor
September, 2011
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