INTEREST IN ANIMALS 53 



bad reputation for his surly temper, but for me he had only 

 kindness. It is true I came laden with gifts, bundles of clover 

 and sweet corn for which he seemed duly grateful, but it was 

 not all a matter of fodder. The great beast liked to play with 

 me, lifting me with his trunk as if he would throw me a hundred 

 feet away, and then searching my pockets for tid-bits. I can 

 hear him now as he would trumpet and dance when I came in 

 sight and when I went away. As for the camel, all my advances 

 were rejected ; the miserable brute spat at me. I have loathed 

 camels ever since. I count that noble game-cock and that 

 glorious elephant as among my teachers: they brought me to 

 love animals and appreciate man's relation to them. 



Like other lads, I had much to do with dogs. They abounded 

 in the society in which I was reared ; but then, as now, the dog 

 was commonplace, not recognized as an outside animal, but 

 taken rather as an integral part of man. It is the creatures 

 which have their independent emotional life that give us the 

 great lesson of our kinship with the lower stages of living. This 

 lesson is sorely needed. I have known famous naturalists who 

 had never come by either an intellectual or emotional under- 

 standing of their place in the chain of intelligence, and without 

 this a man remains a stranger in this world. 



The awakening which came to me at about twelve years of 

 age, rapidly led, through my interest in animals, to a general 

 interest in all the visible realm of nature. My father had some 

 knowledge of mineralogy and a keen eye for all natural objects. 

 He had in his study the remnants of what had been a really good 

 private collection of minerals, made while he was a student 

 under instruction from Warren, and in intimate connection 

 with Charles T. Jackson, a brilliant man, afterward well known 

 as a geologist. There were not more than a hundred specimens 

 in this little cabinet, but they were all of kinds calculated to 

 arouse the curiosity of a lad, beginning to awaken to the world 

 about him. I remember rather suddenly turning to them, espe- 

 cially to the crystalline shapes. The ordinary dog-tooth spar, and 



