154 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 



and a Graeco-German mother, was an American. 

 Before he was a year old his life-long travels be- 

 gan, his parents visiting ports of Asia and Africa 

 on their way to Marseilles. As a result of this trip, 

 we have the discovery, afterward characteristically 

 announced by him to the world, that " infants are 

 not subject to sea-sickness." At Marseilles his 

 future career was determined for him ; or, in his 

 own language : " It was among the flowers and 

 fruits of that delightful region that I first began to 

 enjoy life, and I became a botanist. Afterward, 

 the first prize I received in school was a book of 

 animals, and I am become a zoologist and a nat- 

 ^ uralist. My early voyage made me a traveller. 

 Thus, some accidents or early events have an in- 

 fluence on our fate through life, or unfold our 

 inclinations." 1 



Rafinesque read books of travel; those of Cap- . 

 tain Cook, Le Vaillant, and Pallas especially; 

 and his soul was fired with the desire " to be a 

 great traveller like them. . . . And I became 

 such," he adds tersely. At the age of eleven he 

 had begun an herbarium, and had learned to read 

 the Latin in which scientific books of the last 

 century were written. " I never was in a regular 

 college," he says, "nor lost my time on dead lan- 

 guages ; but I spent it in reading alone, and by 

 reading ten times more than is read in the schools. 

 I have undertaken to read the Latin and Greek, as 



1 This and most of the other verbal quotations in this paper 

 are taken from an " Autobiography of Rafinesque," of which a 

 copy exists in the Library of Congress. A few quotations have 

 been somewhat abridged. 



