visiting ports of Asia and Africa on their way to Marseilles. As a result of this trip, we have the discovery, afterward duly announced by him to the world, that "infants are not subject to sea-sickness."
At Marseilles his future career was determined for him; or, in his own language: "It was among the flowers and fruits of that delightful region that I first began to enjoy life, and I became a botanist. Afterward, the first prize I received in school was a book of animals, and I am become a zoölogist and a naturalist. My early voyage made me a traveler. Thus, some accidents or early events have an influence on our fate through life, or unfold our inclinations."[1]
Rafinesque now read books of travel, those of Captain Cook, Le Vaillant, and Pallas especially, and his soul was fired with the desire "to be a great traveler like them. . . . And I became such," he adds shortly. At the age of eleven he had begun an herbarium, and had learned to read the Latin in which scientific books of the last century were written. "I never was in a regular college," he says, "nor lost my time on dead languages, but I spent it in reading alone, and by reading: ten times more than is read in the schools. I have undertaken to read the Latin and Greek, as well as the Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese, and fifty other languages, as I felt the need or inclination to study them."
At the age of twelve he published his first scientific paper, "Notes on the Apennines," as seen from the back of a mule on a journey from Leghorn to Genoa. Rafinesque was now old enough to choose his calling in life, and he decided to become a merchant, for, said he, "commerce and travel are linked." At this time came the first outbreaks of the French Revolution, and the peasants of Provence began to dream of "castles on fire and castles combustible," so Rafinesque's prudent father sent his money out of France and his two sons to America.
In Philadelphia Constantine Rafinesque became a merchant's clerk, and his spare time was devoted to the study of botany. He tried also to study the birds, but he says, "The first bird I shot was a poor chickadee, whose death appeared a cruelty, and I never became much of a hunter." During his vacations Rafinesque traveled on foot over parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia. He visited President Jefferson, who, he tells us, asked him to call again. In 1805, receiving an offer of business in Sicily, Rafinesque returned to Europe. He spent ten years in Sicily, the land, as he sums it up, "of fruitful soil, delightful climate, excellent productions, perfidious men, and deceitful women." Here in Sicily he discovered the medicinal squill, which, aided by the equally medicinal paregoric, was once the chief delight of childhood. He commenced gathering this in large quantities for shipment
- ↑ This and most of the other verbal quotations in this paper are taken from an "Autobiography of Rafinesque," of which a copy exists in the Library of Congress. A few quotations have been somewhat abridged.
