Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/230

. After a time he became sole subscriber also, a condition of affairs which greatly exasperated him against the Americans and their want of appreciation of science. He published several historic treatises, and contemplated a "Complete History of the Globe," with all its contents. An elaborate poem of his, dreary enough, is entitled "The World, or Instability." He made many enemies among the American botanists of his time by his overbearing ways, his scorn of their customs and traditions, and especially by his advocacy of crude and undigested though necessary reforms, so that at last most of them decided to ignore his very existence. In those days, in matters of classification, the rule of Linnæus was supreme, and any attempt to recast his artificial groupings was looked at as heretical in the extreme. The attempt at a natural classification of plants, which has made the fame of Jussieu, had the full sympathy of Rafinesque, but to his American contemporaries such work could lead only to confusion. Then, again, in some few of its phases, Rafinesque anticipated the modern doctrine of the origin of species. That the related species of such genera as Rosa, Quercus, Trifolium have had a common origin, a view the correctness of which no well-informed botanist of our day can possibly doubt, Rafinesque then maintained against the combined indignation and disgust of all his fellow-workers. His writings on these subjects read better to-day than when, forty-five years ago, they were sharply re-viewed by one of our then young and promising botanists, Dr. Asa Gray.

But the botanists had good reason to complain of the application of his theories of evolution. To Rafinesque, the production of a new species was a rapid process—a hundred years was time enough—and, when he saw the tendency in diverging varieties toward the formation of new species, he was eager to anticipate Nature (and his fellow-botanists as well), and give it a new name. He became a sort of mono-maniac on the subject of new species. He was uncontrolled in this matter by the influence of other writers, that incredulous conservatism as to one another's discoveries which furnishes a salutary balance to enthusiastic workers. Before his death, so much had he seen, and so little had he compared, that he had described certainly twice as many fishes, and probably nearly twice as many plants and shells, also, as really existed in the regions over which he traveled. He once sent for publication a paper describing, in regular natural history style, twelve new species of thunder and lightning which he had observed near the Falls of the Ohio!

Then, too, Rafinesque studied in the field, collecting and observing in the summer, comparing and writing in the winter. When one is chasing a frog in a canebrake, or climbing a cliff in search of a rare flower, he can not have a library and a museum at his back. The exact work of our modern museums and laboratories was almost unknown in his day. Then, again, he depended too much on his memory