288 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
first voyage, made with his parents on their return to 
France, by way of Scutari in Asia, Smyrna, and Malta, 
led to his first discovery, when he was a year old, for he 
was able to announce that “infants are not subject to 
sea-sickness.” At eleven he read Latin and collected 
plants; at thirteen he wrote his first scientific paper, 
“Notes on the Apennines,” which he had seen when 
traveling from Leghorn to Genoa. His father, who 
set out for China in 1791, fell in with pirates, but man- 
aged to reach America; he died of the yellow fever in 
Philadelphia in 1798. To escape the Reign of Terror in 
France, Rafinesque’s mother fled with her children to 
Italy, where four years were passed at Leghorn. There 
Constantine studied with private tutors, but his educa- 
tion was never formal and he was allowed to follow 
his omnivorous tastes, reading, as he said, ten times 
more than was taught in the schools. His writings are 
mainly in French, Italian, and English, and his facility 
with languages was no doubt remarkable, even if we 
discount his egotized estimate of his own attainments: 
“I have undertaken to read the Latin and Greek, as 
well as the Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese, and fifty other 
languages, as I felt the need or inclination to study 
them.” 
In 1802 Rafinesque was sent with his brother to 
America and became a shipper’s clerk at Philadelphia, 
where he spent all of his spare time in the study of 
nature, plants being his first and greatest love. Here 
he was befriended by Dr. Benjamin Rush, and during 
this period he made the acquaintance of many pioneer 
naturalists in the United States. In 1805 the offer of 
a lucrative situation in Sicily lured him back to the Old 
World and to a country already known to him. There 
he soon discovered the medicinal squill, of ancient re- 
