Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. 33 



with foreign air, and, further, there must be considered 

 the fact that his chair was new and counted of but 

 little importance. Those were the days of a classical 

 education, purely and simply, and there was no interest 

 in any other roots than those of Latin and Greek origin 

 or in leaves of other sort than those which had the 

 cabalistic signs of men who thought and wrote two thou 

 sand or more years ago. He who could quote freely 

 and at length from Horace or Juvenal, or could see in 

 Pindar and Demosthenes meanings of which they them 

 selves never dreamt, was the educated man.* It mattered 

 not how little he might know of gravitation or of 

 dynamics, of bugs or of plants, if only he knew our 

 ancient Latin friends; his education was then complete. 

 Amid literary surroundings such as these Rafinesque 

 now found a home. It would be difficult indeed to find 

 another degree of literary difference so marked as that 

 between Rafinesque and his associate professors. They 

 were, in tastes and pursuits, as unlike as men could be; 



*It needs only in support of this statement that attention be called to 

 the character of the articles which constitute the bulk of the Western Review 

 and Miscellaneous Magazine, published at Lexington, about this time. Its 

 pages contain many labored literary articles, and not a few philosophical ones, 

 in which classical training ran amuck through all the fields of knowledge, 

 compelling attention to its demands to the exclusion of all else. The political 

 articles, which appeared from time to time, continually refer to Greece and 

 to Rome, to Xerxes, to Hannibal, to Epictetus, to Caesar, and to Augustus. 



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