Early life and education
Lea was born on March 4, 1792, in Wilmington, Delaware. His grandparents, John and Hannah Hopton Lea, emigrated to the Province of Pennsylvania with William Penn in 1699. His parents were James J. Lea, a merchant, and Elizabeth Gibson Lea. He was studying to be a physician, but began working at his brother John's import business in Philadelphia at the age of 15. [1]
He was close friends with Lardner Vanuxem as a child and the two developed an interest in geology and were exposed to the mineralogical collection of Adam Seybert.
Lea was born a Quaker but forsook his faith's traditional pacifism and joined the 7th Company of the 24th Pennsylvania Militia during the War of 1812. The unit served as a home guard and never saw action, however he was still expelled from the Religious Society of Friends. [1] In 1820, he married Frances Ann Carey, daughter of noted publisher Mathew Carey.
He received an LL.D. degree from Harvard in 1853.
Business career
His father-in-law Mathew Carey founded the Matthew Carey & Company publishing company and brought his son Henry Charles Carey and Lea in as partners and changed the company name to Matthew Carey & Sons. Matthew retired in 1824 and another of his sons joined the firm and the name was changed to Carey, Lea & Carey. In 1833, William A. Blanchard was brought on as a partner and the firm was briefly known as Carey, Lea & Blanchard until Henry Charles Carey retired in 1836 and the firm name was changed again to Lea & Blanchard. [5] [6] The publishing house became one of the most successful in America, and was known for publishing items such as The Encyclopedia Americana and a dictionary of German lexicon. [6]
In the early 1830s, he became a partner in the Dauphin and Susquehanna Coal Company which owned 42,000 acres on the eastern bank of the Susquehanna River. [1]
In 1851, Isaac retired from the publishing business and made his son Henry Charles Lea a full partner and the name was changed to Lea Brothers. [5]
Scientific career
Lea worked with Lardner Vanuxem during his work on the geology of New York. Many geological histories are defined by mollusk fossils which led Lea to also study living mollusks. [7]
In 1815, Lea joined the Academy of Natural Sciences and published his first paper on minerals found in the Philadelphia area in 1817. [1]
Lea devoted his leisure time to natural history, both collecting objects and publishing books (some illustrated by his son Henry Charles Lea). [8] He was especially interested in freshwater and land mollusks. He studied mollusks from the Ohio River submitted to the Academy of Natural Sciences by Major Stephen Harriman Long and shells collected by his brother near Cincinnati. [1] Lea described these specimens in the publication Description of Six New Specimens of the Genus Unio which he presented at the American Philosophical Society in 1827 and was the first of multiple papers on Unio . For 50 years he delivered and published 279 scientific articles, books and essays. He named 1,842 species of fifty genera of freshwater and land mollusks, however many of the species he described are not distinct. His publications on geology included a range of topics including coal, earthquakes, fossils and minerals. [1]
In 1849, Lea presented a paper on fossilized footprints he discovered in red sandstone in Mount Carbon, Pennsylvania. Lea contended the tracks were reptilian and that due to the strata of rock where the footprints were found, they were from the Devonian Period between 360 and 408 million years old and constituted a new species that he named Sauropus primaevus. The finding sparked a controversy in the geology community and the date of the fossil was challenged by Henry Darwin Rogers, the state geologist of Pennsylvania. Noted geologist Louis Agassiz proposed that the footprints were not those of a reptile but rather those of an amphibian. The footprints have since been identified as coming from an amphibian known as Palaeosauropus primaevus from the Mississippian Age over 330 million years ago. [1]
He was a member and vice-president of the American Philosophical Society (elected in 1828) [11] and also served as president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (1858–1863), both based in Philadelphia. Lea served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860. [12]
Henry Charles Lea was an American publisher, civic activist, philanthropist and historian from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Henry Charles Carey was an American publisher, political economist, and politician from Pennsylvania. He was the leading 19th-century economist of the American School and a chief economic adviser to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase during the American Civil War. His work on protective tariffs was largely influential on the early Republican Party and United States trade policy through the start of the 20th century, and his views on banking and monetary policy were adopted by the Lincoln administration in its issuance of paper fiat currency as legal tender.
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, formerly the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the Americas. It was founded in 1812, by many of the leading naturalists of the young American republic with an expressed mission of "the encouragement and cultivation of the sciences". It has sponsored expeditions, conducted original environmental and systematics research, and amassed natural history collections containing more than 17 million specimens. The Academy also organizes public exhibits and educational programs for both schools and the general public.
Titian Ramsay Peale was an American artist, naturalist, and explorer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a scientific illustrator whose paintings and drawings of wildlife are known for their beauty and accuracy.
Joseph Mellick Leidy was an American paleontologist, parasitologist and anatomist.
Samuel Stehman Haldeman was an American naturalist and philologist. During a long and varied career he studied, published, and lectured on geology, conchology, entomology and philology. He once confided, "I never pursue one branch of science more than ten years, but lay it aside and go into new fields."
Mathew Carey was an Irish-born American publisher and economist who lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the father of economist Henry Charles Carey.
Clepsysaurus is a dubious genus of extinct archosaur described by Isaac Lea in 1851 from remains discovered in the Carnian Passaic Formation of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Two species are known: C. pennsylvanicus and C. veatleianus. The holotype of C. pennsylvanicus, ANSP 9526, 9555-71, 9594-5, consists of teeth, ribs and vertebrae, while the holotype of C. veatleianus, AMNH 2331, consists of a single tooth, with AMNH 2330, a tooth, as a referred specimen. Other specimens of C. pennsylvanicus are known, including ANSP 15071 and AMNH 2337.
William Samuel Waithman Ruschenberger was a surgeon for the United States Navy, a naturalist, and an author.
Mathew Carey Lea was an American chemist known for his research on the chemical and physical properties of silver halide salts and their usage in photography. He pioneered early work in mechanochemistry and developed Carey Lea Silver, a photochemical still in use today.
Charles Torrey Simpson was an American botanist, malacologist, and conservationist. He retired to Florida where he became known for conservation.
Charles Delucena Meigs was an American obstetrician who worked as chair of obstetrics and diseases of women at Jefferson Medical College from 1841 to 1861. He worked as editor of The North American Medical and Surgical Journal and published multiple papers and books on various topics in obstetrics including thrombosis as a cause of sudden death in women during childbirth, diseases of the cervix and postpartum infections. He was a fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and served as president from 1845 to 1855.
Horatio Curtis Wood Jr. was an American physician and biologist. Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania family, he attended the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, and after serving as a surgeon in the American Civil War, continued to teach at the University. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he was known for his 1874 text Treatise on Therapeutics, which became a widely used medical textbook, and also for his botanical and zoological work: writing on freshwater algae, fossil plants, arachnids, and myriapods.
Isaac Hays was an American ophthalmologist, medical ethicist, and naturalist. A founding member of the American Medical Association, and the first president of the Philadelphia Ophthalmological Society, Hays published the first study of non-congential colorblindness and the first case of astigmatism in America. He was editor or co-editor of The American Journal of the Medical Sciences for over 50 years.
Paleontology in Pennsylvania refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The geologic column of Pennsylvania spans from the Precambrian to Quaternary. During the early part of the Paleozoic, Pennsylvania was submerged by a warm, shallow sea. This sea would come to be inhabited by creatures like brachiopods, bryozoans, crinoids, graptolites, and trilobites. The armored fish Palaeaspis appeared during the Silurian. By the Devonian the state was home to other kinds of fishes. On land, some of the world's oldest tetrapods left behind footprints that would later fossilize. Some of Pennsylvania's most important fossil finds were made in the state's Devonian rocks. Carboniferous Pennsylvania was a swampy environment covered by a wide variety of plants. The latter half of the period was called the Pennsylvanian in honor of the state's rich contemporary rock record. By the end of the Paleozoic the state was no longer so swampy. During the Mesozoic the state was home to dinosaurs and other kinds of reptiles, who left behind fossil footprints. Little is known about the early to mid Cenozoic of Pennsylvania, but during the Ice Age it seemed to have a tundra-like environment. Local Delaware people used to smoke mixtures of fossil bones and tobacco for good luck and to have wishes granted. By the late 1800s Pennsylvania was the site of formal scientific investigation of fossils. Around this time Hadrosaurus foulkii of neighboring New Jersey became the first mounted dinosaur skeleton exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The Devonian trilobite Phacops rana is the Pennsylvania state fossil.
Sagittunio subrostratus, commonly referred to as the pondmussel or black pondmussel, is a species of freshwater mussel, an aquatic bivalve in the family Unionidae, the river mussels.
Eugenius Nulty was an Irish born American mathematician of the 19th century. He served on the faculty of Dickinson College from 1814 to 1816, and later taught and tutored prominent Philadelphians, including the brothers Mathew Carey Lea and Henry Charles Lea.
The Bridger Formation is a geologic formation in southwestern Wyoming. It preserves fossils dating back to the Ypresian Epoch of the Paleogene Period. The formation was named by American geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden for Fort Bridger, which had itself been named for mountain man Jim Bridger. The Bridger Wilderness covers much of the Bridger Formation's area.
Annie Elisabeth Law was a British-American conchologist, who discovered 11 species and one genus of mollusks, but did not publish formal descriptions of them. She was also a dispatch rider for the Confederate army during the American Civil War and was tried in Knoxville as a confederate informer.
Reuben Haines III was a Quaker farmer, brewer, abolitionist, scientist, ornithologist, meteorologist, firefighter, philanthropist, and educational reformer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
