154 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 
and a Greco-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. Asa 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 zodlogist 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.” 4 
Rafinesque read books of travel, those of Cap- 
tain Cook, Le Vaillant, and Pallas especially ; 
and his soul was fired with the desire “to bea 
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. 
