Polymath maverick with an accent to match

For two centuries Constantine Rafinesque has driven his fellow scientists to distraction. He was a superb field botanist and zoologist, justly famed as the man who named more species than any other person in history - a Google search will disclose "Rafinesque" attached to species after species of invertebrates, fish, birds and mammals since he was the first to describe them scientifically. A true polymath who dabbled in many fields besides natural history - among them archaeology, linguistics, medicine, architecture, philosophy and banking - he was on the verge of genius.

But to many of his fellow scholars and academics he was an impossible human being: vain, self-aggrandising, boastful, given to imposture and, in one notorious case, to fakery. This host of enemies, who included notable American scientists such as Benjamin Silliman, Asa Bray and Thomas Say, refused to take him seriously. But this biography, by Leonard Warren, an emeritus professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, goes far to prove just how wrong his many detractors were.

Rafinesque was born to French parents in Galatha (a Christian suburb of Constantinople) in 1783 and died in Philadelphia in 1840, poverty-stricken and friendless. His career as a scientific rolling stone began in 1802 in Pennsylvania and Delaware, where he gathered botanical specimens. From 1805 to 1815 we find him in Sicily, simultaneously following a commercial career while systematically collecting and describing the island's fauna and flora. But his heart was always set on the American wilderness. In 1815, he set sail with his collections, 50 boxes of books, manuscripts and other materials - all lost when the ship went down during a storm in Long Island Sound.

This disaster failed to stop Rafinesque, determined to emulate his hero, Alexander von Humboldt, in his exploration of the New World's natural wonders. Eventually he went west to Kentucky - then on the US frontier - and by 1819 he had landed a professorship at Transylvania University in Lexington, where he taught botany, Italian and French. In Lexington, he gained a knowledgeable and generous patron, John D. Clifford, who sadly died the next year. This left Rafinesque - a fat, balding man with a strange accent - virtually penniless since his stipend from the university was trifling. The search for a steady income would lead him into all sorts of schemes and near-scams for the rest of his turbulent life.

Nonetheless, he carried out some of his best field research at that institution, until he was fired in 1826. In particular, he investigated prehistoric mound sites in Kentucky with great meticulousness and drew accurate maps. As Charles Boewe has shown, in 1848-49 these maps were shamelessly plagiarised without citation by E.G. Squier and E.H. Davis, considered the "fathers" of eastern US archaeology, and by Caleb Atwater, one of Rafinesque's long list of enemies.

Rafinesque's problem was finding a publication outlet. The scientific establishment of pre-Civil War America did its best to deny him access to their journals; his response was self-publication. He transferred to Philadelphia, where he remained on and off until his death and where he founded the extraordinary Atlantic Journal and Friend of Knowledge .

In 1832, in the first of eight issues in which every known subject on earth was covered, Rafinesque presented evidence that the bars and dots in Maya monuments and Dresden Codex comprised a logical numbering system; and that the language of the inscriptions was the same as that spoken by the Indians of the area. All that was lacking was a Champollion to decipher the script. Warren gives this only a brief paragraph, but modern scholarship views Rafinesque as the "father" of Maya epigraphy.

His struggles with scientific orthodoxy were never-ending, especially in the fields of zoology and botany, for Rafinesque was a dedicated "splitter" and only too ready to establish new species. The way he was hoaxed by his erstwhile friend John James Audubon over some non-existent fish is often quoted against him. Yet in one respect he turns out to have been right and his opponents fundamentally wrong. He did not believe that species were immutable, given once and for all by the creator's hand. In fact, he was a proto-evolutionist, a subject Warren handles well.

Like Erasmus Darwin before him, Rafinesque expressed his ideas about the mutability of nature in a poem, The World, or Instability , published in 1836. There and elsewhere he maintained that everything, even human culture and religion, was in a process of changing from one state to another, and that new species and genera were constantly being formed from others. His timescale, we now know, was far too short, but no other scientist talked this way in early 19th-century America.

His greatest mistake was the Walum Olum , a purported account of the migration of the Delaware Indians from Siberia, written in the Lenape language with accompanying "hieroglyphs". Either Rafinesque produced this hoax himself or someone foisted it on him. It has done lasting damage to his reputation among scholars who have not bothered to discover his genuine contributions to knowledge in so many other fields. As Warren states: "There were two Rafinesques - the precise observer and classifier and the addled victim of his own imagination."

There is something definitely tragic as well as sympathetic about the man who died in abject poverty and ended up in a pauper's grave. He failed to play the academic game in the orthodox way, yet he deserves far better than what the Grand Panjandrums of science and the history of science have said about him. Warren has gone a long way to redress the balance.

Michael D. Coe is emeritus professor of anthropology, Yale University, US, and the author of Breaking the Maya Code.