Whether we consider the valuable additions to scientific literature, note the practical, useful inventions, or record the actual activities in various scientific lines, many Kentuckians will be found on the eminent roll.

A Louisville woman, Ellen C. Semple, has given us "American History and its Geographic Conditions." James N. Baskett, while a novelist, has also contributed some scientific papers that have won him fame in many lands. John Uri Lloyd,—both novelist and scientist,—though a native of New York, was reared in Kentucky. He is a noted chemist and has written much along his line.

Elsewhere, we have spoken of Kentucky inventors, and also given a sketch of the great ornithologist, John James Audubon. We are indebted for facts about prehistoric Kentucky to "Ancient History or Annals of Kentucky" published as an introduction to Marshall's "History of Kentucky," by the eccentric naturalist, C.S. Rafinesque. Though born in Constantinople, he spent seven years as professor of the natural sciences, and of the French, Spanish, and Italian languages in Transylvania University in Lexington. It was Rafinesque who, amid all the privations of pioneer traveling, explored Kentucky in the early part of the nineteenth century, from Greenup on the east to McCracken County on the west. He covered nearly the entire area of the blue grass, and also included in his itinerary the remote counties, Adair, Clay, Harlan, Perry, Pulaski, and Rockcastle, and located one hundred and forty-eight sites and five hundred and five ancient remains or monuments of the Mound Builders.

Audubon tells of his first meeting with this great antiquarian, whose dress, if not fashionable, was at least remarkable. He wore, says Audubon, "a long, loose coat of yellow nankeen which hung loosely about him like a sack, much the worse for the many rubs it had got in its time and stained all over with the juice of plants. A waistcoat of the same, with enormous pockets, reached over a pair of tight pantaloons, the lower part of which was buttoned down to the ankles." In this attire, with a bundle of dried plants on his back, Rafinesque accidentally approached Audubon and asked where the noted naturalist lived. Upon learning it was the great Audubon to whom he was speaking, Rafinesque handed him a letter of introduction in which the writer recommended an "odd fish" which might not have been described in any published treatise. Audubon at once asked to be shown the "odd fish," but soon realized that Rafinesque answered to that name. It was during this visit, that, in his excitement to secure a new species of bat, Rafinesque demolished Audubon's favorite violin. His versatility, his energy, and his achievements stamp him as one of the most remarkable of men in many lines of thought and activity.

In the field of medical science, also, Kentucky in both past and present has been noted. In 1806, Doctor Brashear of Bardstown successfully performed an amputation at the hip joint, the first operation of the kind in the United States. In 1809, Doctor Ephraim McDowell of Danville performed one which was the first of its kind in the world, and of which Doctor Gross in his "Lives of Eminent American Physicians and Surgeons of the Nineteenth Century" says, "Had McDowell lived in France, he would have been elected a member of the Royal Academy of Surgery, received from the king the cross of the Legion of Honor, and obtained from the government a magnificent reward as an acknowledgment of the services rendered his country, his profession, and his fellow creatures."