Peter Lesley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 17, 1819.[1] It is recorded by Sir Archibald Geikie that he was christened Peter after his father and grandfather, and at first wrote his name Peter Lesley, Jr., but, disliking that forename, he eventually transformed his signature by putting the J. of Junior at the beginning. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1838, where he was trained for the ministry. Subsequently, he spent three years assisting Henry D. Rogers in the first geological survey of Pennsylvania.[2]
On the termination of the survey in 1841, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary while also assisting Professor Rogers in preparing the final report and map of Pennsylvania. He graduated from the seminary in 1844, and, in April of that year, he was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Philadelphia. A month later he left for Europe where he studied at the University of Halle, returning to the United States in 1845. He then worked for two years for the American Tract Society, and at the close of 1847 he joined Professor Rogers again in preparing geological maps and sections at Boston. He then accepted the pastorate of the Congregational church at Milton, Massachusetts. He remained there until 1851, when, his views having become unitarian, he abandoned the ministry, returned to Philadelphia, and entered into practice as a consulting geologist.[2]
Lesley was a proponent of the high antiquity of humankind; "My own belief is but the reflection of the growing sentiment of the whole geological world [...] that our race has been upon the earth for hundreds of thousands of years."[4]
His wife, Susan Inches Lesley (1823-1904), was the daughter of Judge Joseph Lyman, of Northampton, Massachusetts, and Anne Jean Lyman (née Robbins), daughter of Edward Robbins. She married Prof. Lesley in 1849, and devoted herself to the work of organized charities in Philadelphia. She published Memoirs of Mrs. Anne J. Lyman (Cambridge, 1876; 2d ed., entitled Recollections of My Mother, Boston, 1886). The couple's daughter was the painter Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown,[5] whose first job was creating geological models for her father.[6]
Peter Lesley died, aged 83, from a stroke at his home in Milton, Massachusetts on June 1, 1903.[7]
Lesley and James Hall's Map Illustrating the General Geological Features of the Country West of the Mississippi River, 1857
Besides many reports and numerous papers in scientific magazines, he published:
Manual of coal and its topography: illustrated by original drawings, chiefly of facts in the geology of the Appalachian region of the United States of North America (1856)
Guide to the iron works of the United States (1858)
The iron manufacturer's Guide to the furnaces, forges and rolling mills of the United States (1859)
Report on the Embreeville Iron Property, East Tennessee (1873)
A map and profile of a line of levels along Slippery Rock Creek (1875)
Historical Sketch of Geological Explorations in Pennsylvania (1876)
^Lesley, Peter (1869). Man's Origin and Destiny Sketched from the Platform of the Sciences, in a Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Lowell Institute, in Boston...1865-6. J.B. Lippincott and Company. p. 66.
