Career
After graduating at Harvard, LeConte in 1851 accompanied Agassiz on an expedition to study the Florida Reef. On his return he became professor of natural science in Oglethorpe University which was located in Midway, Georgia at the time; and from December 1852 until 1856 professor of natural history and geology at Franklin College. From 1857 to 1869 he was a professor of chemistry and geology at South Carolina College, which is now the University of South Carolina.
On January 14, 1846, he married Caroline Nisbet, a niece of Eugenius A. Nisbet. The LeContes had four children grow to adulthood: Emma Florence LeConte, Sarah Elizabeth LeConte, Caroline Eaton LeConte, and Joseph Nisbet LeConte.
During the Civil War LeConte continued to teach in South Carolina. He also produced medicine and supervised the niter works (to manufacture explosives) for the Confederacy. However, after the war he continued to teach, but he claimed to find Reconstruction politics intolerable, with moves of the Reconstruction-era Legislature to deeply cut funding to South Carolina College.
In September 1869, he moved to Berkeley, California to join the faculty of the newly established (1868) University of California. His brother John had come to California in April 1869 to also join the faculty of the new University as a professor of physics. Joseph was appointed the first professor of geology and natural history and botany at the University, a post which he held until his death.
He published a series of papers on monocular and binocular vision, and also on psychology. His chief contributions, however, related to geology. He described the fissure-eruptions in western America, discoursed on earth-crust movements and their causes and on the great features of the Earth's surface. As separate works he published Elements of Geology (1878, 5th ed. 1889); Religion and Science (1874); and Evolution: its History, its Evidences, and its Relation to Religious Thought (1888). This last work anticipates in structure and argument Teilhard de Chardin's "Phenomenon of Man."(1955).
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