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Constantine Samuel Rafinesque
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz, as he is known in Europe (October 22, 1783 – September 18, 1840), was a nineteenth-century polymath born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire and self-educated in France. He traveled as a young man in the United States, ultimately settling in Ohio in 1815, where he made notable contributions to botany, zoology, and the study of prehistoric earthworks in North America. He also contributed to the study of ancient Mesoamerican linguistics, in addition to work he had already completed in Europe.
Rafinesque was eccentric, and is often portrayed as an "erratic genius". He was an autodidact who excelled in various fields of knowledge, as a zoologist, botanist, writer and polyglot. He wrote prolifically on such diverse topics as anthropology, biology, geology, and linguistics, but was honored in none of these fields during his lifetime. Today, scholars agree that he was far ahead of his time in many areas. Among his theories was that ancestors of Native Americans had migrated by the Bering Sea from Asia to North America.
==Biography==
Rafinesque was born on October 22, 1783 in Galata, a suburb of Constantinople.〔 His father F. G. Rafinesque was a French merchant from Marseilles; his mother M. Schmaltz was of German descent and born in Constantinople.〔 His father died in Philadelphia about 1793. Rafinesque spent his youth in Marseilles,〔 and was mostly self-educated; he never attended university.〔(Discovering Lewis & Clark: biography of Rafinesque ); accessed : November 17, 2010〕〔("The oddest of characters" ), ''American Heritage'', April 1985; accessed November 17, 2010.〕 By the age of twelve, he had begun collecting plants for a herbarium. By fourteen, he taught himself perfect Greek and Latin because he needed to follow footnotes in the books he was reading in his paternal grandmother's libraries. In 1802, at the age of nineteen, Rafinesque sailed to Philadelphia in the United States with his younger brother. They traveled through Pennsylvania and Delaware, where he made the acquaintance of most of the young nation's few botanists.
In 1805 Rafinesque returned to Europe with his collection of botanical specimens, and settled in Palermo, Sicily, where he learned Italian.〔 He became so successful in trade that he retired by age twenty-five and devoted his time entirely to natural history. For a time Rafinesque also worked as secretary to the American consul.〔 During his stay in Sicily, he studied plants and fishes,〔 naming many new discovered species of each.
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