Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/232

 "was a better man than he appeared," and while he was undoubtedly a man of great learning and of greater energy, his work does not deserve a high place in the records of science. And his failure seems due to two influences: first, his lack of attention to details, a defect which has vitiated all of his work; and, second, his versatility, which led him to attempt work in every field of learning.

As to this, he says himself: "It is a positive fact that in knowledge I have been a botanist, naturalist, geologist, geographer, historian, poet, philosopher, philologist, economist, philanthropist. By profession a traveler, merchant, manufacturer, brewer, collector, improver, teacher, surveyor, draughtsman, architect, engineer, palmist, author, editor, bookseller, librarian, secretary, and I hardly know what I may not become as yet, since, whenever I apply myself to anything which I like, I never fail to succeed, if depending on myself alone, unless impeded or prevented by the lack of means, or the hostility of the foes of mankind."

"The one prudence in life," says Emerson, "is concentration; the one evil, dissipation."

But a traveler Rafinesque chiefly considered himself, and to him all his pursuits, scientific, linguistic, historic, were but episodes in a life of travel. Two lines of doggerel French were his motto:

 Un voyageur dès le berceau, Je le serai jusqu'au toinbeau."

A traveler from the cradle, I'm a traveler to the tomb."

Long before the invention of railroads and steamboats, he had traveled over most of Southern Europe and Eastern North America. Without money except as he earned it, he had gathered shells and plants and fishes on every shore from the Hellespont to the Wabash. He was the frontiersman of our natural history, the Daniel Boone of American science.

Concerning one element of Rafinesque's character I am able to find no record. If he ever loved any man or woman, except as a possible patron and therefore aid to his schemes of travel, he himself gives no record of it. He speaks kindly of Audubon, but Audubon had furnished him with specimens and paintings of flowers and fishes. He speaks generously of Clifford, at Lexington, but Clifford had given him an asylum when he was turned out of Transylvania University. No woman is mentioned in his autobiography except his mother and sister, and these but briefly. His own travels, discoveries, and publications, filled his whole mind and soul.

Rafinesque died in Philadelphia, in 1840, at the age of fifty-six. He had been living obscurely in miserable lodgings in an unfriendly garret, for his dried plants, and his books published at his own expense, brought him but a scanty income. His scientific reputation had not