Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, the learned, eccentric scientist of
Kentucky and the West, was born near Constantinople, Turkey, October
22, 1783. He was of French-German descent. His boyhood years were
spent in Italy and in traveling on the Continent. Rafinesque came to
America in 1802, and he remained in this country but three years, when
he returned to Italy; and there the subsequent ten years of his life
were passed. In 1809 he married, after a fashion, a Sicilian woman,
Josephine Vaccaro, who bore him two children. Rafinesque returned to
America in 1815, and a short time after his arrival, he met his former
friend, John D. Clifford, of Philadelphia and Lexington--twin-towns in
those days--"the only man he ever loved," who persuaded him to come
out to Kentucky. At Henderson, Kentucky, Rafinesque met the great
Audubon, who took him under his roof, and who told him many amusing
tales of the fishes of the Ohio--which the little scientist believed,
as coming from a famous man--and which caused him no end of trouble
and work in after years. Audubon ridiculed him to his face, which the
simple-minded man could not understand; and in his _Journals_ the
ornithologist has much fun at his guest's expense. That he treated him
very badly, no one can deny. Through Clifford's influence, probably,
Rafinesque was appointed, in 1819, to the chair of natural science and
modern languages in Transylvania University. This was during the
presidency of Horace Holley, when the old University was at the
high-tide of its history, but the diminutive scientist, though
heralded as "the most learned man in America," was not received as
such in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky an hundred years ago. From
the president down to the children of the little city he was looked
upon as an impossible creature. Seven of the best years of his life
were spent in the service of the University and of the town. His
boldest dream for the town was a Botanical Garden, modeled upon the
gardens of France, and though he did actually make a splendid start
toward this ideal, in the end all his plans came to nothing. In June,
1825, Rafinesque left Lexington, never to return. He went to
Philadelphia, where the remaining fifteen years of his life were
spent. Death discovered the little fellow among his books, plants, and
poverty, September 18, 1840, in a miserable, rat-ridden garret on Race
street, Philadelphia. Rafinesque's publications reach the surprising
number of 447, consisting of books, pamphlets, magazine articles,
translations, and reprints. His most important works are _Ichthyologia
Ohiensis, or Natural History of the Fishes Inhabiting the River Ohio
and its Tributary Streams_ (Lexington, 1820), a reprint of which his
biographer, Dr. Call, has published (Cleveland, 1899); and his
_Ancient Annals of Kentucky_, which Humphrey Marshall printed as an
introduction to his _History of Kentucky_ (Frankfort, 1824). The
oversheets of this were made into a pamphlet of thirty-nine pages. The
little work considers the antiquities of the State, and is the
starting point for all latter-day writers upon "the prehistoric men of
Kentucky." Imagination and fact run riotously together, yet the work
has been correctly characterized as "the most remarkable history of
Kentucky that was ever written, or ever will be."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _A Kentucky Cardinal_, by James Lane Allen (New
York, 1894); _Life and Writings of Rafinesque_, by Richard E.
Call (Louisville, Kentucky, 1895); _Rafinesque: A Sketch of his
Life_, by T. J. Fitzpatrick (Des Moines, Iowa, 1911).