114 WANDERINGS AND MEMORIES 



Amongst the successes of his Hfe may be men- 

 tioned the impetus he gave to the research for the 

 eHmination of yellow fever in the canal zone, and 

 what to naturalists was a work of great importance, 

 was his continuous advocacy of the preservation 

 of the fauna and flora of the North American 

 continent. In this he certainly achieved a great 

 measure of success, although in many instances 

 we fear his efforts came too late. 



Personally he was a man of charming disposition, 

 full of thought for others, ever alive to better the lot 

 of the unfortunate, and possessed of that kindly 

 sjrmpathy which we always associate with really 

 great men. His attitude to us during the Great 

 War was that of intense sympathy and under- 

 standing, and in him England has lost her best 

 advocate for future policy, as well as her best friend 

 amongst the statesmen of the world. 



In the spring of 1917, I heard from Roosevelt 

 that he intended raising a Volunteer Corps in the 

 United States for service in France, and after 

 obtaining permission from the Admiralty, I offered 



House in 1908. At one luncheon party the question of Mayne 

 Reid's novels came up. Roosevelt gave a precis of the more 

 remarkable of their plots, of their characters, their defects 

 and strong points. So he could with Dickens, Thackeray, 

 Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain. When 

 I was setting out to study the negro in the New World he 

 gave me from memory an almost complete bibliography of 

 the works discussing the slavery question in the United States, 

 from the books of Anthony Benezet in 1762 to those of Olmsted 

 in 1861. Once, when the then Provost of Oriel called and 

 lunched, and was rather perversely Hellenistic in his lore, 

 Roosevelt, with a twinkle in his eye, turned the subject to the 

 Tartar invasion of Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, 

 and gave us a really remarkable sketch of its chief incidents 

 and ultimate results." — Sir H. H. Johnston, Nature, January 

 16th, 1919. 



