PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 115 



was born in Galata, a suburb of Constantinople, Oct. 22, 1783, 

 and died at Philadelphia, Sept. 18, 1840, of cancer of the 

 stomach. His father's name was Rafinesque, and he was of 

 French extraction, but during the hostilities between the French 

 and Neapolitans, which arose about the time he settled in Sicily, 

 he added the name of his mother to his own and represented 

 himself as an American. He arrived in the United States when 

 only nineteen years of age (1802), and returned to Europe in 

 1805, after which, according to his own account, he was engaged 

 in commercial pursuits and scientific studies at Palermo. He 

 travelled furiously, and collected wherever he went. In 1815 he 

 returned to this country, but the vessel which brought him 

 was wrecked on the coast of Connecticut, and his collections and 

 property were lost, leaving him in a state of poverty from which 

 he never was able to emerge. He was, however, received by 

 American naturalists and others as became his acquirements, and, 

 in 1819, was appointed professor of botany and natural history in 

 Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, which remained 

 his headquarters, in spite of many pedestrian journeys, until 1826, 

 when he removed to Philadelphia, where he remained until his 

 death. His multitudinous writings have been reviewed by Gray, 

 Haldeman, and Tryon in the American Journal of Science, 

 and by Amos Binney in his Terrestrial Mollusks of the United 

 States.* 



Rafinesque was a marked example of the adage, " Great wit to 

 madness nearly is allied," and the workings of a mind of unusual 

 acumen, brilliancy, and activity were always clouded by a cer 

 tain incoherency due to his highly excitable and versatile tem 

 perament. He possessed talents which, properly regulated, 

 would have carried him to the front rank of scientific workers. 



* See Silliman's Journal, vol. 40, ist series, p. 221. 1841 ; also vol. 42, pp. 

 280-91, 1842, and vol. xxxiii, 2d series, p. 163, March, 1862; and Terr. 

 Moll., i, pp. 41-54. 



