Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque
Born	October 22, 1783 Galata, Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
Died	September 18, 1840(1840-09-18) (aged 56) Philadelphia
Nationality	France
Fields	biologist
Author abbrev. (botany)	Raf.

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.

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. 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.