The Oddest Of Characters (June/july 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 4)

The Oddest Of Characters

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Authors: Peggy Robbins

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June/july 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 4

It is quite fitting,” wrote a Philadelphia journalist in 1804, “that the name ‘Rafinesque’ rhymes with ‘picturesque’ and ‘grotesque,’ because so the little man is.” The subject was a struggling twenty-one-year-old scientist named Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, who actually was a rather attractive fellow when he was neatly groomed and at ease and in a good humor, but that was not often.

 

It is quite fitting,” wrote a Philadelphia journalist in 1804, “that the name ‘Rafinesque’ rhymes with ‘picturesque’ and ‘grotesque,’ because so the little man is.” The subject was a struggling twenty-one-year-old scientist named Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, who actually was a rather attractive fellow when he was neatly groomed and at ease and in a good humor, but that was not often.

Most scientists today agree that Rafinesque’s genius was not fully recognized during his lifetime. He claimed that “unjust treatment,” “persecution by enemies,” and “endless discrimination” kept him from attaining the prominent position in science he deserved. Not long before he died—in 1840, bitter and a pauper—he cried, “Time renders justice to all!” It took a long time in his case. More than four decades after his death, G. B. Goode, a late-nineteenth-century historian of American science, decried old references to Rafinesque as the “oddest of characters” and said the man’s eccentricities were only the “outcome of a boundless enthusiasm for the study of nature.” At the turn of the twentieth century the noted American zoologist David Starr Jordan praised him as the “most remarkable man to appear in the annals of American science,” and a generation later the eminent science writer Donald Culross Peattie stated, “Among all the naturalists who have worked on the American continent, Rafinesque is the only one who might clearly be called a titan.”

The man, in reviewing his own “talents and professions … which may appear to exceed belief,” certainly told his contemporaries that he was a genius:”… it is a positive fact that in knowledge I have been a Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist … Traveller, Merchant, Manufacturer, Collector, Improver, Professor, Teacher, Surveyor, Draftsman, Architect, Engineer, Pulmist, Author, Editor, Bookseller, Librarian, Secretary. … I never fail to succeed if depending on me alone, unless impeded and prevented by lack of means, or the hostility of the foes of mankind.”

Rafinesque was born in Constantinople, Turkey, in October 1783 of a French father and a German mother. When he was very young, the family moved to France and then, before he was nine, to Leghorn, Italy. After that Rafinesque seldom saw his trader father, who stayed away on extended voyages. The boy decided he, too, would be a traveler; nature and exploration were the two driving passions of his life.

Rafinesque hiked through the woods of France and Italy, studying flowers, trees, birds, and animals. “It was there among the flowers and fruits that I began to enjoy life,” he wrote, “and I