22 ICHTHYOLOGIA OHJENSIS 



passed here in silence. The most important fact of 

 the expedition was the meeting with John D. Clif- 

 ford, at Lexington, who was instrumental in procur- 

 ing the election of Rafinesque to a professorship in 

 the great Transylvania University, then in the prime 

 of vigorous growth under the presidency of the 

 eminent Unitarian divine, Reverend Horace Holly. 

 This marks the period of the greatest intellectual 

 and literary attainments of Rafinesque, and gave him 

 the opportunity he so long had sought. He was in 

 a veritable new world; the plants and animals had 

 never been either collected or studied; the hand of 

 the husbandman had not yet destroyed much of the 

 primitive forest; untold wealth of natural forms 

 appealed to Rafinesque, the Nature-lover, as they 

 have rarely appealed to any man. To-day even, in 

 the face of the check which specialization furnishes 

 to scientific investigators, few men could withstand 

 this lavish display of new and unknown forms! 

 They were on every hand, in every glade and mead, 

 every brook and spring, the creeks, the rivers, the 

 very rocks themselves. Like a school-boy Rafinesque 

 searched and found, studied, described, drew, sent 

 abroad, the wonderful forms in which he, almost 

 alone, now reveled. Here was his one serious mis- 

 take ; but in face of the facts we may well pardon his 

 widely scattered energy. 



Rafinesque remained nearly eight years at Tran- 

 sylvania University ; these were years of constant toil, 

 with no one to sympathize with his work, for his 

 friend Clifford had died in the second year of his 

 residence at Lexington. The exposure and hard 

 work, — for Rafinesque was an incessant worker, tak- 

 ing little rest, — coupled with that Sicilian " skeleton 



