ROOSEVELT AND WILD LIFE 
By Mr. Edmund Heller 
N'attiralist, Roosevelt African Expedition 
The Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station, the Memo- 
rial to Theodore Roosevelt, is just the sort of memorial which he 
would have approved. There was ever present in Roosevelt a keen 
interest in wild life, primarily an interest in the habits and actions 
of animals, in their family life, and in the way they carried on the 
struggle for existence. Throughout his life in the hunting field 
he was an enthusiastic observer of animal behavior, a far keener 
one than most of our expert naturalists. Nothing would have 
brought more joy to Roosevelt's heart than the establishment of a 
Wild Life Experiment Station such as you have, where animals 
can be studied free from artificial conditions. 
Roosevelt contended for many years that faunal or field natural 
history studies were fully as important a feature of natural history 
as closet or laboratory investigations. At the present time nearly all 
naturalists are of this opinion, but during Roosevelt's youth, when 
he was a student at college, the field naturalist was considered a 
very superficial sort of investigator, and this deprecatory attitude 
kept Roosevelt from taking up faunal natural history as his life 
work. Today, however, all naturalists are agreed that animals react 
normally only in their natural or wild environment, and any observa- 
tions that may be made in the laboratory must be verified in the 
field before they can be accepted as normal or characteristic of a 
particular species. Roosevelt emphasized the idea that the real 
laboratory in which to test theories and study animal behavior is the 
great out-of-doors, the field, where all life is struggling for existence 
and exhibiting its characteristics for our observation and study. 
Colonel Roosevelt may be said to have introduced the term 
" faunal naturalist " to the public through his natural history writ- 
ings. He demonstrated in his African expedition what a marvelous 
faunal naturalist he was by acquiring a great mass of new observa- 
tions on the life histories of the animals with which he met. Roose- 
velt was a practical faunal naturalist who had scant sympathy for 
mere theories in zoology. As an instance of this may be cited his 
application of the protective coloration theories of certain modern 
naturalists to the actual field conditions as he found them in Africa 
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