THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
By Sir Harry H. Johnston 
The ex-President of the United States who died in the first week 
of 1919 was in many ways the most remarkable man I have ever met, 
and combined with unusual qualities of intellect and co-ordinated 
development of bodily skill — for was he not a fine shot, a bold 
equestrian, an untiring marcher, an adept at most games and sports ? 
— a kindness and sweetness of disposition, and a thoughtfulness for 
the happiness and well-being of all around him, very rare in great 
men of the world. 
He was a field-zoologist of the new school, the school which has 
given us J. G. Millais, Radclyfife Dugmore, Ernest Seton, C. W. 
Beebe, and a host of young and middle-aged Americans who have 
studied wild life with unswerving accuracy, seeking only to set 
forth the truth in real natural history, and disposing summarily of 
many a hoary lie and legend about wild life, scorning, moreover, the 
vagueness of statement and nomenclature which arises from imper- 
fect observation and inadequate study. 
Theodore Roosevelt was not only a great naturalist himself, but 
— what in its ultimate effect was even more important — he set, 
as President, the fashion in yovmg America for preserving and 
studying fauna and flora until he had gone far to create a new phase 
of religion. Under his influence young men whose fathers and 
grandfathers had only studied the Bible, the sacred writings of the 
post-exilic Jews and Graeco-Syrian Christians, now realised that 
they had spread before them a far more wonderful Bible, the book 
of the earth itself. Geology, palaeontology, zoology, botany, eth- 
nology, were part of Roosevelt's religion. He may have been a 
specialist in none of these branches of science, but he saw the 
divinity pulsating through them, more glowingly apparent than in 
narrow imaginings of theology. 
The man's memory was prodigious. I once spent some ten days 
— in two separate visits — as his guest at the White 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 IMark Twain. \\"hen I was setting out to study the negro in 
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