CONSTANTINE SAMUEL RAFINESQUE. jgij 



spoke Italian, I had once to save him from being stoned out 

 of a field where he was thought to seek a treasure buried by 

 the Greeks." Rafinesque now invented a new way of distill- 

 ing brandy. He established a brandy distillery, where, said 

 he, " I made a very good brandy, equal to any made in Spain, 

 without ever tasting a drop of it, since I hate all strong liquors. 

 This prevented me from relishing this new employment, and 

 so I gave it up after a time." 



Finally, disgust with the Sicilians and fear of the French 

 wars caused Rafinesque, who was, as he says, "a peaceful 

 man," to look again toward the United States. In 1815 he 

 sailed again for America, with all his worldly goods, including 

 his reams of unpublished manuscripts, his bushels of shells, 

 and a multitude of drawings of objects in natural history. Ac- 

 cording to his own account, the extent of his collections at that 

 time was enormous, and from the great number of scattered 

 treatises on all manner of subjects which he published in later 

 years, whenever he could get them printed, it is fair to sup- 

 pose that his pile of manuscripts was equally great. A consid- 

 erable number of his notebooks, and of papers for which, for- 

 tunately for scientific nomenclature, he failed to find a pub- 

 lisher, are now preserved in the United States National Mu- 

 seum. These manuscripts are remarkable for two things the 

 beauty of the quaint French penmanship and the badness of 

 the accompanying drawings. His numerous notebooks, writ- 

 ten in French, represent each the observations of a busy sum- 

 mer ; and these observations, for the most part unchecked by 

 the comparison of specimens, he prepared for the press during 

 the winter. To this manner of working, perhaps unavoidable 

 in his case, many of Rafinesque's errors and blunders are cer- 

 tainly due. In one of these notebooks I find, among a series 

 of notes in French, the following remarkable observation in 

 English : " The girls at Fort Edward eat clay ! " In another 

 place I find a list of the new genera of fishes in Cuvier's Regne 

 Animal (1817), which were known to him. Many of these are 

 designated as synonymous with genera proposed by Rafinesque 

 in his Caratteri in 1810. With this list is the remark that these 

 genera of Cuvier are identical with such and such genera "pro- 

 posed by me in 1810, but don't you tell it ! " 



Rafinesque was six months on the ocean in the second 

 voyage to America. Finally, just as the ship was entering Long 

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