AN ECCENTRIC NATURALIST. 157 
with, and was taken for a crazy man or a wizard. 
As he hardly 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 distilling 
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reams of unpublished manuscripts, his bushels of 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. According to his own account, 
the extent of his collections at that time was enor- 
mous, and from the great number of scattered 
treatises on all manner of subjects which he pub- 
lished in later years, whenever he could get them 
printed, it is fair to suppose that his pile of manu- 
scripts was equally great. A considerable number 
of his note-books, and of papers for which, fortu- 
nately for scientific nomenclature, he failed to find 
a publisher, are now preserved in the United States 
National Museum. These manuscripts are remark- 
able for two things,—the beauty of the quaint 
French penmanship, and the badness of the ac- 
companying drawings. His numerous note-books, 
written in French, represent each the observations 
