A naturalist, antiquarian, etc., who stated in 1836 "that in knowledge he had been a botanist, naturalist, conchologist, zoologist, geographer, esentographer, physiologist, historian, antiquary, poet, philosopher, economist, and philanthropist; and by profession a traveler, merchant, manufacturer, collector, improver, professor, teacher, surveyor, draftsman, architect, engineer, author, editor, bookseller, librarian, secretary, chancellor, etc."--and believed he could have been any thing, as he "always succeeded in whatever he undertook." This statement gives a key to his life, which was one of great and untiring activity, as well as to his mental character, which enabled him to acquire the reputation of being one of the most learned men of his day. Born in Galata, Constantinople, the son of a merchant, in 1784, after living in France and Italy he came to America in 1802, returning to France in 1805, with a very large botanical collection. Spending ten years in Sicily in making natural history collections and writing various essays, he published in 1815 his _Analysis of Nature_. The same year he sailed for America, but was wrecked on Long Island, losing most of his collections and effects. Induced to come West from Philadelphia by John D. Clifford, of Lexington, in 1818, he was elected Professor of Botany and Natural History in Transylvania University in 1819, lectured to the students in the Medical College, was librarian, and taught French, Spanish, and Italian.[31] He also traveled and made collections in botany, natural history, etc., publishing various papers and pamphlets and preparing materials for his proposed great work, _Tellus, or the History of the Earth and Mankind, Chiefly in America_, of which in ten years he had, he said, prepared five thousand pages of manuscript and five hundred maps and figures. An idea of what this work might have been may be gathered from a remarkable essay--_Ancient History or Annals of Kentucky_--which was published in 1824 as an introduction to _Marshall's History of Kentucky_, in which, in twenty-eight small octavo pages, he professes to give not only the migrations, changes, filiations, annals, and descriptions of all the various tribes and peoples which inhabited Kentucky since the creation of man, but gives also a history of all the changes of geology and natural history, according to his views and in accordance with Mosaic cosmogony, substituting epochs for days, however. An essay which may be characterized as a very terse and dry recital of numerous doubtful statements, woven in a web of very audacious speculation. His success as a teacher in Transylvania was not great. He died in Philadelphia September 18, 1840, having published in 1836 his life, travels, and researches in North America and Europe from 1802 to 1835, and several small works on natural history, botany, etc.