3-^2 



THE AMERICAS MUSEUM JOURXAL 



why I do not care for brandied peaches. 

 All I can say is that almost as soon as I 

 began to read at all I began to like to 

 read about the natural history of beasts 

 and birds and the more formidable or 

 interesting reptiles and fishes. 



The fact that I speak of "natural 

 history" instead of "biology," and use 

 the former expression in a restricted 

 sense, will show that I am a belated 

 member of the generation that regarded 

 Audubon with veneration, that ac- 

 cepted Watertou— 

 Audubon's violent 

 critic — as the ideal 

 of the wandering 

 naturalist, and that 

 looked upon Brehm 

 as a delightful but 

 rather awesomely 

 erudite example of 

 advanced scientific 

 thought. In the 

 broader field, thank 

 Heaven, I sat at the 

 feet of Darwin and 

 Huxley : and studied 

 the large volumes 

 in which Marsh's 

 and Leidy's palseon- 

 tological studies 

 were embalmed, 

 with a devotion 

 that was usually at- 

 tended by a dreary 



lack of reward — what would I not have 

 given fifty years ago for a writer like 

 Henry Fairfield Osborn. for some scien- 

 tist who realized that intelligent lay- 

 men need a guide capable of building 

 before their eyes the life that was, in- 

 stead of merely cataloguing the frag- 

 ments of the death that is. 



I was a very nearsighted small boy, 

 and did not even know that my eyes 

 were not normal until I was fourteen; 

 and so my field studies up to that pe- 

 riod were even more worthless than 

 those of the average boy who "collects" 

 natural history specimens much as he 

 collects stamps. I studied books indus- 



Courtesy of the Macmillan Company 

 I was extremely nearsighted as a boy 

 and could not see to make field observa- 

 tions, but I raised young gray squirrels, 

 tamed a woodchuck. and made friends with 

 a mother white-footed mouse 



triously but nature only so far as could 

 be compassed by a molelike vision; my 

 triumphs consisted in such things as 

 bringing home and raising— by the aid 

 of milk and a syringe— a family of very 

 young gray squirrels, in fruitlessly en- 

 deavoring to tame an excessively un- 

 amiable woodchuck, and in making 

 friends with a gentle, pretty, trustful 

 white-footed mouse which reared her 

 family in an empty flower pot. In or- 

 der to attract my attention birds had to 

 be as conspicuous as 

 bobolinks or else 

 had to perform 

 feats such as I re- 

 member the barn 

 swallows of my 

 neighborhood once 

 performed, when 

 they assembled for 

 the migration along- 

 side our house and 

 because of some 

 freak of bewilder- 

 ment swarmed in 

 through the win- 

 dows and clung 

 helplessly to the 

 curtains, the furni- 

 ture, and even to 

 our clothes. 



Just before my 

 fourteenth birthday 

 my father — then a 

 trustee of the American Museum of 

 Natural History — started me on my 

 rather mothlike career as a naturalist by 

 giving me a pair of spectacles, a French 

 pin-fire double-barreled shotgun — and 

 lessons in stuffing birds. The spectacles 

 literally opened a new world to me. The 

 mechanism of the pin-fire gun was 

 without springs and therefore could not 

 get out of order— an important point, 

 as my mechanical ability was nil. The 

 lessons in stuffing and mounting birds 

 were given me by Mr. John G. Bell, a 

 professional taxidermist and collector 

 who had accompanied Audubon on his 

 trip to the then "Far West." Mr. Bell 



