Free The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down by Jesse Browner Page B

Litholepis, and Pilodictis. One fish, the "devil-jack diamond-fish" (Litholepis adamantinus), supposedly grew up to ten feet long and weighed four hundred pounds. Sleeping on the surface of the water and often mistaken
     for a log, it had "scales as hard as flint, and even proof against lead balls! . . . they strike fire with steel!" It seems
     incredible that Rafinesque would publish such findings without proof, until we remember that all of his information had been
     "communicated to me by Mr. Audubon," a man whom he respected and had no reason to mistrust. (This incriminating evidence went
     unnoticed because it was published long before Audubon achieved fame.) After all, as far as Rafinesque was concerned, Audubon
     had been an exemplary host and generous guide in the wilderness.
    Because the prank went undiscovered during Rafinesque's lifetime, it did immeasurable harm to his reputation. The Ichthyologia Ohiensis continued to be a puzzle and a torment to ichthyologists for many years, since no one but Rafinesque ever succeeded in identifying
     the mythological creatures it describes. It led to the general opinion among his peers 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." His few remaining supporters began to melt away. Already widely disliked and dismissed by his colleagues for his
     rash denunciations and his monomania on the subject of new species, as well as for his lack of scientific rigor, Rafinesque
     had been hanging on to respectability by a thread. His Ichthyologia cut it. Even today, more than 160 years after his death, his work continues to be debunked. One noted scholar, David Oestreicher,
     recently disproved Rafinesque's claim to have discovered the Walum Olum, an epic saga written in pictographs on tree bark, supposedly documenting the Lenape tribe's migration to North America from
     Siberia across the frozen Bering Strait.
    His declining years in Philadelphia tell a miserable tale of desperation, paranoia, and grandiosity. He became the kind of
     man who refers to his perceived enemies as "the foes of man­kind." While writing, seemingly, on every subject under the sun
     from the principles of wealth and safe banking, through the Hebrew Bible, to the cure for consumption, not to mention a two-hundred-page
     poem titled The World; Or, Instability - he claimed to have invented coupon bonds, steam plows, aquatic railroads, and fire-proof houses. In 1832, he made the utterly
     delusional claim that "my illustrations of 30 years' travels, with 2,000 figures will soon begin to be published, and be superior
     to those of my friend Audubon." Although he published more than nine hundred titles in his lifetime, he was utterly ignored
     and forgotten at the time of his death of cancer in 1840. His landlord locked the corpse in his room, intending to sell it
     to a medical school, until a small group of friends broke in, lowered it by ropes out the back window, and spirited it away
     for burial in the "Strangers Ground" of Ronaldson's cemetery. In the words of one biographer, he "loved no man or woman, and
     died, as he had lived, alone." When sold at auction, his lifetime's collection of books and specimens, filling eight drays,
     left his administrator $14.43 in debt.
    It could be argued that Audubon's abuse of the laws of hospitality - his cruel pranks played upon a trusting and vulnerable
     guest had a tangible negative impact on the progress of American science and naturalism. While such a claim is debatable and
     may even be grandiloquent, in my opinion it barely scratches the surface of the enormity of Audubon's crime.
    The story is told in Judges of the traveling Levite who, on his way from Bethlehem to Ephraim, is given shelter by an old
     farmer of Gibeah. That evening, the Benjaminites of Gibeah surround the farmer's house and demand that he deliver the Levite
     to them.