Edward Drinker Cope was born in Philadelphia July 28, 1840, of
distinguished American ancestry. His grandfather, Caleb Cope, was the
staunch Quaker of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who protected Major André
from mob violence. Thomas Pim Cope, his grandfather, founded the house
of Cope Brothers, famous in the early mercantile annals of Philadelphia.
His father, Alfred, the junior member of the firm, was a man of very
active intellect and showed rare judgment in Edward’s education.
Together the father and son became brisk investigators, the father
stimulating by questions and by travel the strong love of nature and of
natural objects which the son showed at an unusually early age. In
August, 1857, they took a sea voyage to Boston, and the son’s journal is
full of drawings of jellyfish, grampuses, and other natural objects seen
by the way. When eight and a half years old he made his first visit to
the Museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences, “on the 21st day of the
10th Mo., 1848,” as entered in his journal. He brought away careful
drawings, measurements, and descriptions of several larger birds, but
especially the figure of the entire skeleton of an ichthyosaur, with
this quaint memorandum: “Two of the sclerotic plates look at the
eye—thee will see these in it.” At the age of ten he was taken upon a
longer voyage to the West Indies. It is not improbable that these
voyages exerted a lasting influence upon him.
The principal impression he gave in boyhood was of incessant activity in
mind and body, of quick and ingenious thought, reaching in every
direction for knowledge, and of great independence in character and
action. It is evident that he owed far more to the direct study of
nature and to his own impulses as a young investigator than to the five
or six years of formal education which he received at school. He was
especially fond of map drawing and of geographical studies. His natural
talent for languages may have been cultivated in some degree by his
tutor, Dr. Joseph Thomas, an excellent linguist, editor of a
biographical dictionary. Many of his spare winter hours were passed at
the Academy of Natural Sciences. After the age of thirteen the summer
intervals of boarding-school life and later of tutoring were filled
among the woods, fields, and streams of Chester County, Pennsylvania,
where an intimate knowledge of birds was added to that of batrachians,
reptiles, and insects. He showed a particular fondness for snakes. One
of these excursions, taken at the age of nineteen, is described in a
letter to his cousin (dated June 24, 1859), in which, at the close of a
charming description of the botany of the region, appears his discovery
of a new type:
I traced the stream for a very considerable distance upon the rocky
hillside, my admiration never ceasing, but I finally turned off into
the woods towards some towering rocks. Here I actually got to
searching for salamanders and was rewarded by capturing two specimens
of species which I never saw before alive. The first (_Spelerpes
longicauda_) is a great rarity here. I am doubtful of its having been
previously noted in Chester County. Its length is 6 inches, of which
its tail forms nearly four. The color is deep brownish yellow thickly
spotted with black, which becomes confluent on the tail, thus forming
bands. To me a very interesting animal—the type of the genus
_Spelerpes_, and consequently of the subfamily _Spelerpinæ_, which I
attempted to characterize in a paper published in the _Proceedings of
the Academy of Natural Sciences_. I send thee a copy, with the request
that thee will neither mention nor show it,[10] for—however trifling—I
would doubtless be miserably annoyed by some if thee should. Nobody in
this country (or in Europe, of _ours_) knows anything about
salamanders, but Professor Baird and thy humble coz., that is, in some
respects. Rusconi, the only man who has observed their method of
reproduction, has written enough to excite greatly one’s curiosity and
not fully satisfy it. With suitable appliances of aquariums, etc., I
should like to make some observations. The other salamander I caught
was _Plethodon glutinosum_—the young—remarkable for the great number
of teeth that lie together in two patches on the “basisphenoid” bone;
about 300 or more.
Another passage gives an insight into his strong opinion, so often
expressed afterward, as to what constitutes the real pleasures of life:
Pleasant it is, too, to find one whose admiration of nature and detail
is heightened, not chilled, by the necessary “investigation”—which, in
my humble opinion, is one of the most useful as well as pleasing
exercises of the intellect, in the circle of human study. How many are
there who are delighted with a “fine view,” but who seldom care to
think of the mighty and mysterious agency that reared the hills, of
the wonderful structure and growth of the forests that crown them, or
of the complicated mechanism of the myriads of higher organisms that
abound everywhere; who would see but little interesting in a fungus,
and who would shrink with affected horror from a defenseless toad.
Having passed six summers among the woods and streams of Chester County,
Pennsylvania, it is not surprising to find him, at the time this letter
was written, perfectly familiar with the plants, birds, snakes, and
salamanders of eastern Pennsylvania, and perfectly aware of the rarity
of such knowledge. His range extended with astonishing rapidity; first
among the living reptiles and amphibians; then among living and
palæozoic fishes; then among the great extinct reptiles of New Jersey
and the Rocky Mountains; finally among the ancient American quadrupeds.
He acquired in turn a masterly knowledge of each type. Irreverent toward
old systems, eager and ambitious to replace them by new ones of his own,
with unbounded powers of hard work, whether in the field or at his desk,
he rapidly became a leading spirit among the workers in the great realm
of the backboned creation, both in America and Europe. While inferior in
logic, he showed Huxley’s unerring vision of the most distinctive
feature in a group of animals, as well as the broad grasp of Cuvier and
of Cuvier’s famous English disciple, Owen. While most men of our day are
able to specialize among the details of an order, or at most of a class,
Cope, at the age of thirty-four, had in his mental horizon at once the
five great classes, although since Owen’s time they had been greatly
expanded by palæontological discovery. He was thus the last and most
distinguished representative of the old school of comparative
anatomists. His high pressure of thirty-eight years’ work was not
consistent with excelling accuracy. We have often to look behind the
returns in using Cope’s work. Yet if it lacks German exactness, French
beauty of presentation, and the solidity which marks the best English
scientific workmanship, its dominant principles are sound and its chief
anatomical generalizations will endure longer than those of either Owen
or Cuvier.
With this peculiar fitness for great studies came first the glorious
opportunity of entering the unknown western field as a pioneer with
Marsh and Leidy. In 1866 he was the first to find along the New Jersey
coast remains of the leaping dinosaur, _Lælaps aquilunguis_, and he
anticipated Huxley in comparing these reptiles with the birds. In 1871
he extended his explorations westward into what is now the most arid
portion of Kansas, among the remains of the ancient marine monsters, the
ram-nosed mosasaur and the sea-serpent, or elasmosaur. Following up the
rapid advance of government exploration in the Rocky Mountains between
1872 and 1878, he discovered in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming the
great amphicœlias, the gigantic camarasaurus, and the frill-necked
dinosaur agathaumas. As a pioneer in exploration among these giant
animals he was obliged to draw his conclusions largely from fragmentary
and imperfect materials, leaving the field open to Professor Marsh’s
more exhaustive explorations, which were supported by the government.
Yet Professor Cope illuminated the incomplete fragments with his
reasoning and his fertile imagination. When a bone came into his hands,
his first step was to turn it over and over, to comprehend its form
thoroughly, and to compare it with its nearest ally, then to throw out a
conjecture as to its uses and its relation to the life economy of the
animal as a whole. One often found him virtually living in the past,
vividly picturing to himself the muddy shores of the Permian seas of
Texas, where the fin-back lizards basked, or the great fresh-water
expanses of Wyoming and Montana, where the dinosaurs wandered. His
conclusions as to the habits and modes of locomotion of these animals,
often so grotesque as to excite laughter, were suggestive revivals from
the vast deeps of time of the muscular and nervous life which once
impelled the mighty bones. It is fortunate that some of this imaginative
history has been written down by Mr. Ballou and that, although
physically enfeebled by a mortal illness, Professor Cope in his last
days was able to convey to Mr. Knight, the artist, his impressions of
how these ancient saurians lived and moved.
The second feature of his opportunity was, of course, that this pioneer
exploration came early in the age of Darwinism, when missing links, not
only in human ancestry, but in the greater chain of backboned animals,
were at the highest premium. Thus he was fortunate in recording the
discovery in northwestern New Mexico of by far the oldest quadrupeds
known, in finding among these the most venerable monkey, in describing
to the world hundreds of links—in fact, whole chains—of descent between
the most ancient quadrupeds and what we please to call the higher types,
especially the horses, camels, tapirs, dogs, and cats. He labored
successfully to connect the reptiles with the amphibians and the latter
with the fishes, and was as quick as a flash to detect in the paper of
another author the oversight of some long-sought link which he had been
awaiting. Thus in losing him we have lost our ablest and most discerning
critic. No one has made such profuse and overwhelming demonstration of
the actual historical working of the laws of evolution, his popular
reputation perhaps resting most widely upon his practical and
speculative studies in evolution.
Many friends in this country and abroad have spoken of the invigorating
nature of his companionship. A life of intense activity, harassed for
long periods by many difficulties and obstacles, many of them of his own
making, was nevertheless wholly without worry, that destroyer of the
mind so common in our country. His half-century’s enjoyment of research,
extending from his seventh to his fifty-seventh year, can only be
described in its effects upon him as buoyant; it lifted him far above
disturbance by the ordinary matters of life, above considerations of
physical comfort and material welfare, and animated him with a serene
confidence in the rewards which Science extends to her votaries. He
exemplified the truth of the words which Peacock puts into the
meditation of Asterius:
... while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course,
affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid—to maturity, calm
and grateful occupation—to old age, the most pleasing recollections
and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and
while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the
intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself
independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of
human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His
days are always too short for his enjoyment; ennui is a stranger to
his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices
to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing
and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.
While working at Cope’s museum-residence at Philadelphia, I have had
many queer experiences in the odd, half-Bohemian restaurants which the
naturalist frequented. The quality of the meal was a secondary
consideration to him, provided it afforded sufficient brain fuel. While
eating he always relaxed into pure fun and displayed a large fund of
amusing anecdotes of the experiences, mishaps, and frailties of
scientists, his own as often as those of others. He worked deliberately
and gave his whole mind to one subject at a time, if he considered it of
special importance, this power being aided by his remarkable memory of
species and of objects long laid aside for future reference. In his
field exploration his scientific enthusiasm burned still higher in
pursuit of an unknown type or a missing link. Neither horses nor men
could keep pace with his indefatigable energy. Heat and alkali-water
were totally disregarded. From one of his Bitter Creek Desert trips he
returned to Fort Bridger completely exhausted and for weeks was
prostrated with fever. Only a short time before his death he laughingly
related that after a solemn warning by a physician to avoid horse-back
riding and exposure to water, his health had been greatly improved in
the course of a summer by three hundred miles’ exercise in the saddle in
North Dakota and several weeks’ wading in New Jersey swamps. His house
in Pine Street became every year a greater curiosity as the accumulating
fossils, books, and pamphlets outtaxed the shelves and began to thicken
like stratified deposits upon the floor in dust-laden walls and lanes.
Even his sleeping-room was piled to the ceiling, and he closed his eyes
for the last time while lying upon a bed surrounded on three sides by
the loved objects of his life-work.
The most conspicuous feature of Cope’s character from boyhood upward was
independence; this was partly the secret of his venturesome and
successful assaults upon all traditional but defective systems of
classification. Seldom has a face reflected a character more fully than
that of Professor Cope. His square and prominent forehead suggested his
vigorous intellect and marvelous memory; his brilliant eyes were the
media of exceptional keenness of observation; his prominent chin was in
traditional harmony with his aggressive spirit. From this rare
combination of qualities so essential to free investigation sprang his
scientific genius, and, with exceptional facilities of wealth and
culture in his early education, he became a great naturalist—certainly
the greatest America has produced.
As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range and effectiveness
of knowledge and ideas with Cuvier and Owen. When we consider the short
life of some of the favorite generalizations of these great men he may
well prove to be their superior as a philosophical anatomist. His work,
while inferior in style of presentation, has another quality, which
distinguishes that of Huxley, namely, its clear and immediate perception
of the most essential or distinctive features in a group of animals. As
a natural philosopher, while far less logical than Huxley, he was more
creative and constructive, his metaphysics ending in theism rather than
in agnosticism.
Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist. After Huxley he was
the last representative of the old broad-gauge school of anatomists, and
he is only to be compared with members of that school. His life-work
bears the marks of great genius, of solid and accurate observation as
well as of inaccuracy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of
work. Although the greater number of his Natural Orders and Natural Laws
will remain as permanent landmarks in our science, a large part of his
systematic work will require laborious revision and thus is far from
standing as a model to the young zoologist.
Appreciation of greatness is a mark of the civilization and culture of a
people. Cope’s monumental work, preserved in thousands of notes, short
papers, and memoirs, and in three bulky government quartos, constitutes
his assurance of enduring fame. Some of his countrymen, and even of his
fellow workers, allowed certain of his characteristics to obscure his
stronger side in their estimate of him and his work, and during his life
he received few of the honors such as foreigners are wont to bestow upon
their countrymen of note. When we think more deeply of what really
underlies human progress, we realize that only to a few men with the
light of genius is it given to push the world’s human thought along, and
that Edward Drinker Cope was one of these men.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by Underwood and Underwood_
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
]
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1858–1919
In his early life Roosevelt was a warm friend and companion of my
naturalist brother, Frederick. During the last ten years of his life I
became very intimate with him, especially after the writing of my “Age
of Mammals” in 1910, which he read with ardor. Recalling his
experiences as Police Commissioner of the City of New York, in writing
to me of this book he said he enjoyed comparing certain politicians
with whom he was thrown with the hyænodons and certain less desirable
animal citizens of the Tertiary age! It was perhaps this running
parallel between human nature and animal nature which grew on his mind
and caused him to seek my advice when invited to prepare and deliver
the Romanes Lecture at Oxford, which he entitled “Biological Analogies
in History.” He was more kinds of a man than any one I have ever
known—that is, able in more lines.
In this “Impression” I endeavor to show that the scientific side of
Roosevelt’s life is to be taken seriously; that he had unusual ability
as a naturalist and observer, which would have led to a distinguished
career in science had he not been turned to government. Above all
things he desired to be truthful and strictly accurate, and he took
infinite pains not to exaggerate but to present the real facts.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
NATURALIST
“Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.”
—ROOSEVELT.
Theodore Roosevelt doubtless inherited his natural history bent from his
father, who was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History in
the year 1869. I had the good fortune to recall young Theodore in his
boyhood, because of no life may it more truly be said that “the child is
father of the man.” He was one of a youthful band of bird-lovers,
observers and collectors, among whom was my brother Frederick, who came
together in the seventies. While Frederick confined himself to birds,
Theodore was interested also in mammals and small amphibians, and he
came back from their collecting trips with all kinds of specimens.
Frederick invited Theodore to collect birds with him in the forests of
the Hudson River highlands, and on one occasion, when every pocket was
full of specimens, Theodore suddenly discovered what he believed to be a
new species of frog. Having no other place for it, he put it on top of
his head and clapped on his hat. Things went very well until the boys
happened to meet the Honorable Hamilton Fish, then Secretary of State,
taking his dignified afternoon drive along the Hudson with Mrs. Fish. Of
course both boys doffed their hats, whereupon Theodore’s frog, tired of
confinement, made a spring forward! That the youthful collector
recovered and replaced the frog as soon as the Secretary’s carriage was
out of sight illustrates one of Roosevelt’s great characteristics as a
naturalist—to collect at all hazards, at any amount of personal
inconvenience. Like the young Darwin, who brought back a species of bug
in his mouth because he had no more space in his pocket, the boy
Roosevelt never let an opportunity pass and finally became one of the
greatest of American collectors. In a letter to me dated December 9,
1914, he wrote:
My memory is that I was one of the group who founded the Linnæan
Society, although it was then a very small society and my part was
humble and inconspicuous. As a boy I worked in the museum and
specifically remember skinning some rather reddish white-footed mice
which I thought were golden mice and was much disappointed to find
that they were not. Fred and I worked under Bell and sometimes visited
the museum together and did work there. Bell’s shop was down town on
Broadway. I remember very well once being allowed to look over a large
number of South American mice in the museum when I was a small boy and
appealing to Mr. Bickmore to know how I could get at the relationship
of the South American mice with our northern mice of the same family.
Fred and I did much about the same kind of work but I was much more
interested than he was in the book part of it.
Roosevelt’s boyish collection of birds led to his initial training under
Bell, a well-known taxidermist of New York at that time, and, still more
unusual, to his discovery of a new species of bird and the preparation
of his first scientific paper describing it.[11] This illustrates
another characteristic, which is lacking in many naturalists, namely,
the desire to publish as promptly as possible and to lose not a precious
moment of time in getting ready for the next publication. This
characteristic finally made Theodore Roosevelt a voluminous writer on
natural history in the last two decades of his life. During his ranching
experience he was constantly observing the western game mammals and he
made extensive contributions to our knowledge of their habits and
distribution. Birds were his first love, and by far the most thorough
knowledge which he displayed was in the field of ornithology; he knew
not only the birds and their songs but also all their scientific names.
Lord Grey, in an address to the Harvard students, verified this
statement of Roosevelt’s unusual knowledge of birds, British as well as
American. Walking through the New Forest together they observed upward
of thirty species of birds, each of which Theodore Roosevelt knew by
familiar and scientific name, recognizing many of them by what he had
read of their songs.
Among extinct animals, in which I am especially interested, Roosevelt
was not an original observer, but he was a voracious reader of
everything worth while written about them and soon became extremely well
informed. In this connection I recall an amusing and characteristic
incident. Receiving an invitation to deliver one of the Romanes Lectures
at Oxford—perhaps the greatest lectureship of the kind in the
world—Roosevelt wrote to me, as follows, for advice as to whether he
could do it and should do it:
I have just received from Lord Curzon, the Chancellor of Oxford, a
request to deliver the Romanes Lecture at any time I see fit. I shall
probably accept for the spring that I get out of Africa on my way back
to the United States. It seems to me worth while for me to do so.
Doesn’t it seem so to you? It is a lecture which has been delivered by
Gladstone, Huxley, John Morley, Bryce, and other men of that stamp.
I replied in the affirmative on both questions and he immediately wrote
back that he would prepare the lecture on condition that I would read it
over and make corrections, since it was my peculiar field of work. At
that time he was President of the United States, nearing the end of his
term and engaged in a tremendous struggle with both the Senate and the
House, on which for the time he had apparently lost his hold. This
political preoccupation, however, did not prevent his preparing three
very important addresses which he had been asked to deliver, in Berlin,
in Paris, and that above mentioned in Oxford.
In a relatively short time I received the manuscript of his Romanes
Lecture. It was full of analogies between the extinct animal kingdom and
the kingdoms and principalities of the human world, in which he compared
one moribund government in Europe to the _Megatherium_ and another that
had ceased to progress about three centuries ago to the _Glyptodon_! I
drew heavy blue pencil lines across these pages, with the word “omit” in
the margin, and wrote: “I have left out certain passages that are likely
to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred
to.” It developed later that the expurgated passages were quite dear to
the author, but in keeping with his character he thanked me warmly and
assured me that
I have profited by your advice to at once change what I said about the
Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, and I think I now have it so that no
legitimate offense can be taken. But you rather frighten me by
speaking of the importance which you say will be attached to my
speech. I am speaking purely as a layman and as a private citizen, and
when I accepted the invitation it never occurred to me that any more
importance would be attached to what I said than, for instance, to
what Curzon or Bryce said in their lectures.
Shortly afterward, at a White House luncheon, I was surprised when
President Roosevelt informed the entire table that I had been reviewing
his Romanes Lecture and softening some of his favorite war-provoking
passages. I had already read the manuscript twice, but I told him I
would be glad to look it over again. I shall never forget his reply;
with a broad sweep of his hand, ending with his fist on the luncheon
table, he said:
No, I am not going to touch that lecture again. I shall put it away,
send it to London, and entirely dismiss it from my mind until I take
the train for Oxford—that Romanes Lecture is finished!
He kept this resolution and instead of taking the manuscript of his
three great European addresses with him, as other authors would have
done, he went to Africa with only the Dark Continent in his mind. This
was one of the secrets of his extraordinary success, namely, his power
to concentrate all his thought and energy for the time being on a single
object.
Some years after Roosevelt’s return from Africa and his triumphal tour
of Europe, including the reception at Oxford, in conversation with the
Archbishop of York our talk turned on Theodore Roosevelt and this
Romanes Lecture of 1910. Said His Grace: “I heard Roosevelt, and in the
way of grading which we have at Oxford we agreed to mark the lecture
‘beta minus’ but the lecturer ‘alpha plus.’ While we felt that the
lecture was not a very great contribution to science we were sure that
the lecturer was a very great man, to be ranked in the plus A class.
After the lecture Colonel Roosevelt asked me how I liked it. I may have
expressed rather qualified admiration and seeing my hesitation he said:
‘Well, that lecture would have been a great deal stronger had not one of
my scientific friends in America _blue-penciled the best part of it_.’”
While perhaps strongest in his knowledge of birds, Theodore Roosevelt
also gained an extraordinary knowledge of mammals, especially of North
America and of Africa. In preparing for his African trip he called upon
me for all the books I could supply from the Osborn Library in the
American Museum, which in many respects is one of the most complete in
the country, if not in the world. For several weeks he consumed five
books a week, sitting up to the small hours of the morning to complete
his reading or until Mrs. Roosevelt insisted upon his retiring. Thus in
the course of a few weeks he had read all that had been written about
the great mammals of Africa from Sclater to Selous. He read so rapidly
that it did not seem possible that he could absorb it all, yet when we
gathered at Sagamore Hill to talk over his expedition—a group of the
very best naturalists familiar with African life whom he could get
together for luncheon—he displayed a knowledge of the genera and species
and of the precise localities where each might be found which was equal
or superior to that of any man in the room. To cite only one instance of
his marvelous memory and of his thoroughness of preparation: a question
arose as to the locality of a particular subspecies, Grevy’s zebra
(_Equus grevyi foai_). Roosevelt went to the map, pointed out directly
the particular and only spot where it could be found and said that he
thought the expedition could not possibly get down in that direction.
Equipped with this knowledge and aided by three or four exceptional men
like Heller and Akeley, he conducted, under the auspices of the
Smithsonian Institution, by far the most successful expedition that has
ever penetrated Africa, the chief collections from which are now housed
in our National Museum in Washington, a few fine specimens coming to the
American Museum. Not content with his magazine articles in _Scribner’s_
about the African trip, Roosevelt set to work with Heller and wrote one
of the finest books we have, “African Game Trails,” a volume replete
from cover to cover with accurate, original information—in fact, a real
contribution.
Roosevelt’s return from Africa and triumphal progress through Germany,
France, and England, which reached a climax in the boisterous welcome he
received in the avenues of New York, left his personality utterly
untouched by a trace of vanity. A few days afterward, at a very quiet
lunch at the Museum, I spoke of the great opportunity afforded by the
detachment of his life in Africa to gain a true perspective of his life
and career, such as it is impossible to gain in the crowded conditions
of the modern world. I shall always remember his gesture and reply.
Partly raising his hands in front of his face, as if to shut out the
inner vision, he said, “I never want to look at or think about myself.”
In the many conversations and conferences which we enjoyed together and
in the correspondence of the succeeding years, the impression which
Roosevelt made upon me was one of innate modesty, of full consciousness
of the limitations of his powers and of sincere deference to the
opinions of more experienced men, especially in his own beloved field of
natural history. The same desire to be accurate and to be right
displayed in the preparation of his Romanes Lecture reappeared from time
to time in the submission of his opinions and theories to other
naturalists.
Perhaps the finest illustration of his lack of self-deception came out
in a private testimonial dinner given him by his friend Robert Collier.
The dinner was by far the most brilliant one of the kind I have ever
attended; the guests came from various parts of the country and included
only his warm personal friends and admirers. When it came Roosevelt’s
turn to speak he leaned forward, resting both closed hands on the table
after the manner of Clemenceau, and spoke very quietly, with the utmost
simplicity and directness, expressing with brief candor his own feelings
regarding his reception abroad and at home. Briefly rehearsing his
experiences abroad, he said that he was far more gratified by his
reception at home and welcome to America than by any of the acclamation
he had received abroad. Then, lowering his voice and his head, he
continued:
But, my friends—you all are my friends—I am not deceived for one
moment. I know the American people; they have a way of erecting a
triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he
may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment!
Yes, my friends, I am having a bully time. I am swimming on the very
crest of the wave and enjoying it immensely, but I am not for a moment
deceived; next week or next month I may be again in the trough of the
wave, but I assure you I shall be swimming just as hard and enjoying
life just as much as I now am.
None of his friends at that time believed that such a prophecy could
possibly be realized, yet it came true with amazing suddenness. Within a
few weeks his name had apparently left the headlines for good; it
appeared only in small type in brief paragraphs on inside pages. To the
superficial observer, to those who did not know the real Roosevelt and
his powers of resilience his career was ended.
The lull in publicity gave him the quiet he needed to devote to three
volumes of natural history and to prepare for his last and altogether
greatest period of exploration. His manifold ability and the marked
characteristics of his multiple personality came out in the course of
his plans for the great expedition to South America projected in the
spring of 1913 and executed between October, 1913, and June, 1914. He
had selected an unknown and particularly dangerous region, where the
native tribes had never been thoroughly subdued by the Brazilian
government. He marked out this region as his first choice for a South
American expedition. I sent word to him through our mutual friend, Frank
M. Chapman, that I would never consent to his going to this particular
region under the American Museum flag, that I would not assume even part
of the responsibility for his entering such a dangerous country and not
returning alive. With a smile he sent back to me through Chapman a
characteristic reply:
Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any
nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is
necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready
to do so.
Although more prudent plans prevailed and we finally determined upon a
route which resulted in the discovery of the Rio Roosevelt, yet the
exposure, the excessively moist climate, the dearth of food, clothing
and supplies, and the malarial infection very nearly cost Roosevelt his
life. There is no doubt that the hazard of the trip meant nothing to
him. While never reckless, he was absolutely fearless. His plans were
made with the utmost intelligence and thoroughness, and with the trained
assistance of his son Kermit, the South American experience and stalwart
courage of George K. Cherrie, and the devoted companionship of Colonel
Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and Leo E. Miller, he led the most
important expedition that has ever gone from North into South America.
As a result of this expedition through Paraguay and the wilderness of
Brazil more than 450 mammal and 1375 bird specimens were added to the
American Museum collections, in addition to the geographic results,
which aroused such a chorus of discussion and diversity of opinion.
Roosevelt was so impressed with the importance of continuing the
exploration that on his return he personally contributed two thousand
dollars from his literary earnings to send his companion naturalists
back to the field.
An American statesman, who should have known better, once characterized
Roosevelt as “one who knew a little about more things than any one else
in this country.” This gives an entirely false impression of Roosevelt’s
mind, which was of quite the contrary order. What Roosevelt did know in
history and in natural history he knew thoroughly; he went to the very
bottom of things, if possible, and no one was more conscientious than he
where his knowledge was limited or merely that of the intelligent
layman. His thorough research in preparing for the African and South
American expeditions was not that of the amateur or of the sportsman but
of the trained naturalist who desires to learn as much as possible from
previous students and explorers.
The State of New York will erect a splendid memorial to Theodore
Roosevelt the Naturalist and Explorer which will perpetuate the
idealistic and courageous aspects of his character and life as a
naturalist. It will adjoin the American Museum of Natural History, which
he loved and which inspired him to the activities of his youth and his
mature years, where he sought the companionship of men of kindred
ambitions and to which he repaired, in the intervals of politics and of
pressing duties of every kind, for keen and concentrated discussions on
animal coloration, the geographic distribution of mammals and birds, the
history of human races, evolution of special groups of animals, and the
furtherance of his expeditions. The memorial will remind boys and girls
of all generations of Americans of Theodore Roosevelt’s spirit of
self-effacement, of love, of zeal, of fearlessness, of energy, of
intelligence with which they should approach nature in all of its
wonderful aspects.
[Illustration:
JOHN BURROUGHS—JUNE, 1896
]