b?; d.?
Biographical Background
He was a Scotchman and a civil engineer. Flint sailed from Scotland to New
York City, from which he journeyed to Philadelphia and then to Pittsburgh.
On 14 October 1819, he began a voyage down the Ohio, and in his letters
he described the towns along the river. At Portsmouth, Ohio, he made side
trips into Ohio and Kentucky. He was at Washington, Kentucky, on
Christmas Day and at Cincinnati on New Year’s. He went on to the Falls of
the Ohio in February, and remained in Jeffersonville, Indiana, for more
than eighteen months. From the town he wrote several letters published in
1822.
Involvement
with Hypogean Fish research
In 1820 he recorded that ‘a Colonel C – [sic] of Indiana told me that a
settler in his neighbourhood [sic] digging a well, penetrated into a stream
of water, and found blind fishes in it.’ He added as a footnote that ‘Since
the above was written, a notice of blind fishes has appeared (if I mistake
not) [sic] in the memoirs of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh’ (Flint
1822, p. 256).
I reviewed the
entire collection of this journal, which consists of eight volumes
published between 1808 and 1838, and did not find any reference to that
blind fish. |
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