Constantine Samuel Rafinesque

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz (French pronunciation: [kɔ̃stɑ̃tin(ə) samɥɛl ʁafinɛsk(ə)ʃmalts]) (October 22, 1783 – September 18, 1840) was a French polymath of the early 19th century. Born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire, he was self-educated in France.

As a young man, Rafinesque-Schmaltz traveled to the United States, eventually settling in Ohio in 1815. There, he made significant contributions to botany, zoology, and the study of prehistoric earthworks in North America. Beyond his previous extensive work in Europe, he also contributed to the study of ancient Mesoamerican linguistics.

Rafinesque was an eccentric and 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. An outcast in the American scientific community, his submissions were automatically rejected by leading journals. Among his theories were that ancestors of Native Americans had migrated by the Bering Sea from Asia to North America, and that the Americas were populated by black indigenous peoples at the time of European contact.

The standard author abbreviation Raf. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.

Rafinesque was born on 22 October 1783, in Galata, a suburb of Constantinople. His father, F. G. Rafinesque, was a French merchant from Marseille; his mother, M. Schmaltz, was of German descent and born in Constantinople. His father died in Philadelphia about 1793. Rafinesque spent his youth in Marseille, and was mostly self-educated; he never attended university. By the age of 12, he had begun collecting plants for an herbarium. By 14, he had taught himself 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 19, 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 25 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 newly discovered species of each. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1808.

Rafinesque had a common-law wife. After their son died in 1815, he left her and returned to the United States. When his ship Union foundered near the coast of Connecticut, he lost all his books (50 boxes) and all his specimens (including more than 60,000 shells). Settling in New York, Rafinesque became a founding member of the newly established Lyceum of Natural History. In 1817, his book Florula Ludoviciana [es] or A Flora of the State of Louisiana was strongly criticized by fellow botanists, which caused his writings to be ignored. By 1818, he had collected and named more than 250 new species of plants and animals. Slowly, he was rebuilding his collection of objects from nature.^{[citation needed]}

In the summer of 1818, in Henderson, Kentucky, Rafinesque made the acquaintance of fellow naturalist John James Audubon, and stayed in Audubon's home for some three weeks. Audubon, although enjoying Rafinesque's company, took revenge upon him (for an incident where Rafinesque damaged one of Audubon's prized violins) by describing fantastic, made-up species, prompting Rafinesque to publish descriptions of them.