Theodore Roosevelt | Page 6

the day with
brushing my hair, washing my hands and thinking in fact having a
verry dull time."
November 27. "I did the same thing as yesterday."
They all came back to New York and again he could study and amuse
himself with natural history. This study was one of his great pleasures
throughout life and when he was a man he knew more about the
animals of America than anybody except the great scholars who
devoted their lives to this alone.
It started with a dead seal that he happened to find laid out on a slab in
a market in Broadway. He was still a small boy, but when he heard that
the seal had been killed in the harbor, it reminded him of the adventures
he had been reading about in Mayne Reid's books. He went back to the
market, day after day, to look at the seal, to try to measure it and to
plan to own it and preserve it. He did get the skull, and with two
cousins started what they gave the grand name of the "Roosevelt
Museum of Natural History"!
Catching and keeping specimens for this museum gave him more fun
than it gave to some of his family. His mother was not well pleased
when she found some young white mice in the ice-chest, where the
founder of the "Roosevelt Museum" was keeping them safe. She
quickly threw them away, and her son, in his indignation, said that
what hurt him about it was "the loss to Science! The loss to Science!"
Once, he and his cousin had been out in the country, collecting

specimens until all their pockets were full. Then two toads came
along,--such novel and attractive toads that room had to be made for
them. Each boy put one toad under his hat, and started down the road.
But a lady, a neighbor, met them, and when the boys took off their hats,
the toads did what any sensible toads would do, hopped down and
away, and so were never added to the Museum.
The Roosevelt family visited Europe again in 1873, and afterwards
went to Algiers and Egypt, where the air, it was hoped, would help the
boy's asthma. This was a pleasanter trip for him, and the birds which he
saw on the Nile interested him greatly.
His studies of natural history had been carried on in the summers at
Oyster Bay on Long Island, on the Hudson and in the Adirondacks.
They soon became more than a boy's fun, and some of the observations
made when he was fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years old have found
their way into learned books. When the State of New York published,
many years afterwards, two big volumes about the birds of the state,
some of these early writings by Roosevelt were quoted as important. A
friend has given me a four- page folder printed in 1877, about the
summer birds of the Adirondacks "by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and H.
D. Minot." Part of the observations were made in 1874 when he was
sixteen. Ninety- seven different birds are listed.
When he was fifteen and had returned a second time from Europe, he
began to study to enter Harvard. He was ahead of most boys of his age
in science, history and geography and knew something of German and
French. But he was weak in Latin, Greek and mathematics. He loved
the out-of-doors side of natural history, and hoped he might be a
scientist like Audubon.

CHAPTER II
IN COLLEGE
Roosevelt entered the Freshman class of Harvard University in 1876. It

is worth while to remember that this man who became as much of a
Westerner as an Easterner, who was understood and trusted by the
people of the Western States, was born on the Atlantic coast and
educated at a New England college.
The real American, if he was born in the East, does not talk with
contempt about the West; if he is a Westerner he does not pretend that
all the good in the world is on his side of the Mississippi. Nor,
wherever he came from, does he try to keep up old quarrels between
North and South. Theodore Roosevelt was an American, and admired
by Americans everywhere. Foolish folk who talk about the "effete
East," meaning that the East is worn out and corrupt, had best
remember that Abraham Lincoln did not believe that when he sent his
son to the same college which Theodore Roosevelt's father chose for
him.
At Harvard he kept up his studies and interest in natural history. In the
house where he lived he sometimes had a large, live turtle and two or
three kinds of snakes. He went in to Boston and came back with a
basket full of