Botanical Gazette. 



Vol. VIII. 



JANUARY, 1883. 



No. 1. 



Some North American Botanists. 



I. C. S. Rafwesque. 



No name connected with American botany suggests greater 

 possible success and more dismal actnal failure than that of Con- 

 stantine S. Rafinesqiie-Schmaltz. His ambition was his destruc- 

 tion, for it seemed to consist in establishing new genera and 

 species and this he pursued so persistently that in his later years it 

 became a monomania. His earlier writings contain real contribu- 

 tions to botanical science, but his later are simply collections of 

 absurdities which if recognized at all would so cumber our 

 synonymy that it would tend to make of it a hopeless tangle. And 

 so this botanist of real genius, who boasted of having established 

 over three thousand new genera and species, has his name attached 

 to but a paltry dozen of genera in Gray's Manual, which covers 

 nearly all the ground of his personal explorations. In his volumi- 

 nous and scattered writings hundreds of pages must be read to 

 find one which contains anything of value. Rafinesque should be 

 held up before the young botanist of to-day as the type of J a 

 species-maker run mad, whose tendency was to so magnify every 

 slightest deviation from the type that to him it meant a new genus 

 or species. This statement finds it culmination in the paper which 

 he sent to a well known scientific journal, in which he described in 

 regular natural history style twelve new species of thunder and 

 lightning. 



The subject of this sketch was a Sicilian and first came to this 

 country in 1802, remaining for three years, engaged in exploring 

 our Atlantic slope, travelling on foot over much of the territory 

 between Northern Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 1815 he re- 

 turned from Europe and remained until his death, which occurred 

 in September, 1810. During these 25 years he explored most 

 indefatiguably from Vermont to Virginia and westward to the 

 Wabash River. In 1819 he was appointed Professor of Natural 

 Sciences in the University of Lexington, Kentucky, where he re- 

 mained for seven years. In this time he claims to have explored 

 that state thoroughly and made excursions into neighboring states 

 north and south. During his last years he was engaged chiefly in 

 exploring southern New Jersey and the pine-barrens, 



