Luisier (Father Alphonse)

A native of Switzerland, he belongs to the Society of Jesus and was for some years a teacher at the now defunct Colégio de Campolide in Lisbon. In 1907 he received a collection of Madeiran mosses assembled by one of the authors of this Elucidário. He was later sent the excellent bryological collection that had belonged to James Yate Johnson and is today the property of the Seminary Museum (Museu do Seminário). These were the main materials for his studies of Madeiran bryology, on which he has published the following works, all of great value: Note sur quelques mousses nouvelles pour la flore de Madère (Bullet. Soc. Port. Sc. Nat, 1, 2, 1907), Deuxième note sur les mousses de Madère (Ibid., II, I, 1908), Contribution à l'Etude des Muscinées de Madère (Broteria, vols VIII and IX, 1909 and 1910) and Les Mousses de Madère (Ibid., vol. XV, 1917 to 1922).

Professor A. Luisier does not study mosses alone; he has also devoted himself to the study of flowering plants, and volume XIX of the Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana contains a paper of his on the plants of the Setúbal region.

Deprived of his bryological collections at the time of the 1910 revolution, he later managed to recover part of them, which enabled him to continue his most valuable studies of the mosses of the Madeira archipelago.