336 Obituary. [Ibis, 



From youth upwards they exhibit a strong disposition to 

 lead others and allow uone of those obstacles that deter 

 lesser creatures to obstruct the path o£ ambition and 

 success. Theodore Eoosevelt was one of these "super- 

 men," and though born with advantages superior to the 

 common lot, there was always the irresistible verve about 

 him that carries others on and arrests attention. Even 

 when reading his first writings in the ' Century ' Magazine, 

 where he describes how he captured two desperadoes in the 

 heart of the Rockies and took them unaided in the depth of 

 winter over hundreds of miles of desolate jn-airies to the 

 nearest settlement where they could be tried and convicted, 

 he exhibited the fact that he was not only a man of excep- 

 tional courage and resource but also one out to do his duty 

 to his country. His rural life on the Little Missouri taught 

 him many things, and above all made him a lover of the 

 great out-of-doors with its birds, beasts, and virile men. 

 Yet iu all his life he always placed his sports and private 

 tastes in a category subservient to the one aim and object of 

 his life, which was to lead the people to better and higher 

 things, to form the National policy of his country and to 

 clean Government and private concerns of those undesirable 

 elements which clog the wheels of all progress. That was 

 wiiy he attacked the meat-packers of Chicago and the rotten 

 police system of New York; and if his detractors accused 

 him of only stirring up the mud without cleansing the 

 stables of Augeus, they forgot the honesty of purpose and 

 the difficulty of achieving successful results in a land, at any 

 rate at that time, seething with dirt and venal corruption. 



Readers of ' The Ibis,' however, are more concerned with 

 Roosevelt the Naturalist than Roosevelt the President or 

 Social Reformer, From his childhood he told me he always 

 loved birds and animals. By the time he was sixteen he 

 knew all the birds of his early home and had studied the 

 j)rincipal works of American Ornitliolog}'. When he was 

 eighteen he went to Egypt and made a small collection of 

 Nile Valley birds, which I think he afterwards presented 

 to some museum. After this he does not seem to have 



