THE START 3 



the museum, who wrote me that the museum would be 

 pleased to send under me a couple of naturalists, whom, 

 with my approval, Chapman would choose. 



The men whom Chapman recommended were Messrs. 

 George K. Cherrie and Leo E. Miller. I gladly accepted 

 both. The former was to attend chiefly to the ornithology 

 and the latter to the mammalogy of the expedition; but 

 each was to help out the other. No two better men for 

 such a trip could have been found. Both were veterans 

 of the tropical American forests. Miller was a young man, 

 born in Indiana, an enthusiastic naturalist with good lit- 

 erary as well as scientific training. He was at the time 

 in the Guiana forests, and joined us at Barbados. Cherrie 

 was an older man, born in Iowa, but now a farmer in Ver- 

 mont. He had a wife and six children. Mrs. Cherrie had 

 accompanied him during two or three years of their early 

 married life in his collecting trips along the Orinoco. Their 

 second child was born when they were in camp a couple 

 of hundred miles from any white man or woman. One 

 night a few weeks later they were obliged to leave a camp- 

 ing-place, where they had intended to spend the night, be- 

 cause the baby was fretful, and its cries attracted a jaguar, 

 which prowled nearer and nearer in the twilight until they 

 thought it safest once more to put out into the open river 

 and seek a new resting-place. Cherrie had spent about 

 twenty-two years collecting in the American tropics. Like 

 most of the field-naturalists I have met, he was an unusually 

 efficient and fearless man; and willy-nilly he had been forced 

 at times to vary his career by taking part in insurrections. 

 Twice he had been behind the bars in consequence, on one 

 occasion spending three months in a prison of a certain 



