Joseph Le Conte (alternative spelling: Joseph LeConte) (February 26, 1823 – July 6, 1901) was a physician, geologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and early California conservationist. Early life Of Huguenot descent, he was born in Liberty County, Georgia, to Louis Le Conte, patriarch of the noted LeConte family, and Ann Quarterman. He was educated at Franklin College in Athens, Georgia (now the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia), where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. After graduation in 1841, he studied medicine and received his degree at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1845. (In 1844 he travelled with his cousin John Lawrence LeConte for over one thousand miles along the Upper Mississippi River in a birchbark canoe.) After practising for three or four years in Macon, Georgia, he entered Harvard University and studied natural history under Louis Agassiz. An excursion made with Professors J. Hall and Agassiz to the Helderberg mountains of New York developed a keen interest in geology. Career After graduating from Harvard, Le Conte in 1851 accompanied Agassiz on an expedition to study the Florida Reef. On his return he became professor of natural science at 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 (the sole college at the University of Georgia at that time). 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 Le Conte(s) had four children grow to adulthood: Emma Florence Le Conte, Sarah Elizabeth Le Conte, Caroline Eaton Le Conte, and Joseph Nisbet Le Conte. During the Civil War Le Conte continued to teach in South Carolina. He also produced medicine and was involved in research and development operations of the Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau, associated with the Confederate Secret Service. In his autobiography he wrote that he found Reconstruction intolerable. He referred to "a carpet-bag governor, scalawag officials, and a negro legislature controlled by rascals" and stated that the "sudden enfranchisement of the negro without qualification was the greatest political crime ever perpetrated by any people". Discouraged by unsettled postwar conditions at the University of South Carolina,