|
|
Audubon and Rafinesque
Nature Bulletin No. 189-A April 23, 1965
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
Seymour Simon, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt. of Conservation
AUDUBON AND RAFINESQUE
John James Audubon, naturalist, ornithologist and great painter of
birds, was born April 26, 1785, in what is now Haiti. He was the son
of a French naval officer, a wealthy sugar planter with estates in the
West Indies, France and Pennsylvania. While very young, Audubon's
mother died and he was taken by his father to France where he grew
up and was educated. From early boyhood he had a passion for
drawing birds, taxidermy, and collecting birds, their nests and their
eggs.
In 1803 he was sent to his father's estate in eastern Pennsylvania. In
1807, newly married, he and another young man opened a frontier
store in Kentucky -- first in Louisville and later in Henderson. For
almost 50 years, except for trips to England, Scotland and France in
connection with the publication and sale of his book and except for
periods in which he painted portraits and taught dancing, fencing and
French in order to obtain money, Audubon traveled to observe and
paint the wildlife in America. He went down the Ohio and Mississippi
rivers in a flatboat to New Orleans; he explored the bayous along the
Gulf of Mexico as far as Galveston, Texas, and the Atlantic coast from
Key West to Labrador. At the age of 58 he traveled up the Missouri
River as far as the buffalo country of western North Dakota.
Audubon saw, described and painted sights that never will be seen
again. He lived in the heroic age of American life when this was virgin
country and the whooping crane, the trumpeter swan, the ivory-billed
woodpecker, the passenger pigeon and the buffalo were plentiful. A
friend of Daniel Webster and Daniel Boone, he kept detailed diaries
and journals wherever he went. He painted birds life-size, whether
eagles or warblers, and was the first to paint them in action, in natural
poses in their native surroundings with all the wild vegetation.
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, the man whom David Starr Jordan
called "the Daniel Boone of American science", and perhaps the
greatest of all the early naturalists, was for many years almost
forgotten or mentioned only with pity and contempt. But he announced
a theory of evolution many years before Drawin, and his name will live
as long as plants, fishes and mollusks are studied. Brilliant, but
disorderly in mind and habit, he constantly delved into and wrote
copiously on such varied fields of knowledge as botany, fish and other
aquatic life, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, Indian languages and
mounds, the Bible and poetry. He had a mania for discovering and
naming new forms of plant and animal life, frequently giving new
names to kinds already known, including some non-existent fishes of
which Audubon, for a joke, showed him colored drawings.
Rafinesque was born in a suburb of Constantinople on October 23,
1783, of French and German parents. He grew up in Genoa, Italy;
lived for 10 years in Sicily; and when he came to America, in 1815,
his ship was wrecked at the entrance to Long Island Sound and he lost
everything he owned, including all his books, manuscripts and
priceless collections. Hearing of this, his wife ran away with a strolling
actor, and from that day he became a suspicious, lonely man. From
1818 to 1826 he was professor of natural science in Transylvania
University at Lexington, Kentucky -- a typical "absent-minded
professor": oddly clothed, dirty, eccentric and the target for practical
jokes. It was during this period that he visited Audubon. He spent the
last years of his life in Philadelphia, in dire poverty and unsound in
mind.
"Audubon died full of riches and honor, with the knowledge that his
memory should be cherished as long as birds should sing. Rafinesque
loved no man or woman, and died, as he had lived, alone. "
To return to the Nature Bulletins Click Here! |
|
Update: June 2012
|
|
