The Start 3 



cause much of the ground over which we were to pass 

 had not been covered by collectors. He saw Henry Fair- 

 field Osborn, the president of the museum, who wrote 

 me that the museum would be pleased to send imder me 

 a couple of naturalists, whom, with my approval, Chap- 

 man 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 ornithol- 

 ogy 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 vet- 

 erans of the tropical American forests. Miller was a 

 young man, born in Indiana, an enthusiastic naturalist 

 with good literary as well as scientific training. He was 

 at the time in the Guiana forests, and joined us at Bar- 

 bados. Cherrie was an older man, born in Iowa, but 

 now a farmer in Vermont. He had a wife and six chil- 

 dren. 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 camping-place, where they 

 had intended to spend the night, because 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 



