Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
William Henry Letters," and a dozen others like them were first-class,
good healthy stories, interesting in the first place, and in the next
place teaching manliness, decency, and good conduct. At the cost of
being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls'
stories--"Pussy Willow" and "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's
Life," just as I worshiped "Little Men" and "Little Women" and "An
Old-Fashioned Girl."
This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my reveling
in such tales of adventure as Ballantyne's stories, or Marryat's
"Midshipman Easy." I suppose everybody has kinks in him, and even as
a child there were books which I ought to have liked and did not. For
instance, I never cared at all for the first part of "Robinson Crusoe"
(and although it is unquestionably the best part, I do not care for it
now); whereas the second part, containing the adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, with the wolves in the Pyrenees, and out in the Far East, simply
fascinated me. What I did like in the first part were the adventures
before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with the Sallee
Rover, and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their
improbable bath in the ocean. Thanks to being already an embryo
zoologist, I disliked the "Swiss Family Robinson" because of the wholly
impossible collection of animals met by that worthy family as they
ambled inland from the wreck. Even in poetry it was the relation of
adventures that most appealed to me as a boy. At a pretty early age I
began to read certain books of poetry, notably Longfellow's poem,
"The Saga of King Olaf," which absorbed me. This introduced me to
Scandinavian literature; and I have never lost my interest in and
affection for it.
Among my first books was a volume of a hopelessly unscientific kind by
Mayne Reid, about mammals, illustrated with pictures no more artistic
than but quite as thrilling as those in the typical school geography.
When my father found how deeply interested I was in this not very
accurate volume, he gave me a little book by J. G. Wood, the English
writer of popular books on natural history, and then a larger one of his
called "Homes Without Hands." Both of these were cherished possessions.
They were studied eagerly; and they finally descended to my children.
The "Homes Without Hands," by the way, grew to have an added association
in connection with a pedagogical failure on my part. In accordance
with what I believed was some kind of modern theory of making education
interesting and not letting it become a task, I endeavored to teach my
eldest small boy one or two of his letters from the title-page. As the
letter "H" appeared in the title an unusual number of times, I selected
that to begin on, my effort being to keep the small boy interested, not
to let him realize that he was learning a lesson, and to convince him
that he was merely having a good time. Whether it was the theory or my
method of applying it that was defective I do not know, but I certainly
absolutely eradicated from his brain any ability to learn what "H" was;
and long after he had learned all the other letters of the alphabet in
the old-fashioned way, he proved wholly unable to remember "H" under any
circumstances.
Quite unknown to myself, I was, while a boy, under a hopeless
disadvantage in studying nature. I was very near-sighted, so that the
only things I could study were those I ran against or stumbled over.
When I was about thirteen I was allowed to take lessons in taxidermy
from a Mr. Bell, a tall, clean-shaven, white-haired old gentleman, as
straight as an Indian, who had been a companion of Audubon's. He had
a musty little shop, somewhat on the order of Mr. Venus's shop in "Our
Mutual Friend," a little shop in which he had done very valuable work
for science. This "vocational study," as I suppose it would be called
by modern educators, spurred and directed my interest in collecting
specimens for mounting and preservation. It was this summer that I got
my first gun, and it puzzled me to find that my companions seemed to see
things to shoot at which I could not see at all. One day they read aloud
an advertisement in huge letters on a distant billboard, and I then
realized that something was the matter, for not only was I unable to
read the sign but I could not even see the letters. I spoke of this to
my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles,
which literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how
beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles. I had been a
clumsy and awkward little boy, and while much of my clumsiness and
awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of
it was due to the fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant
that I was not seeing. The recollection of this experience gives me
a keen sympathy with those who are trying in our public schools and
elsewhere to remove the physical causes of deficiency in children,
who are often unjustly blamed for being obstinate or unambitious, or
mentally stupid.
This same summer, too, I obtained various new books on mammals and
birds, including the publications of Spencer Baird, for instance, and
made an industrious book-study of the subject. I did not accomplish
much in outdoor study because I did not get spectacles until late in the
fall, a short time before I started with the rest of the family for a
second trip to Europe. We were living at Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson. My
gun was a breech-loading, pin-fire double-barrel, of French manufacture.
It was an excellent gun for a clumsy and often absent-minded boy. There
was no spring to open it, and if the mechanism became rusty it could be
opened with a brick without serious damage. When the cartridges stuck
they could be removed in the same fashion. If they were loaded, however,
the result was not always happy, and I tattooed myself with partially
unburned grains of powder more than once.
When I was fourteen years old, in the winter of '72 and '73, I visited
Europe for the second time, and this trip formed a really useful part of
my education. We went to Egypt, journeyed up the Nile, traveled through
the Holy Land and part of Syria, visited Greece and Constantinople;
and then we children spent the summer in a German family in Dresden. My
first real collecting as a student of natural history was done in Egypt
during this journey. By this time I had a good working knowledge of
American bird life from the superficially scientific standpoint. I had
no knowledge of the ornithology of Egypt, but I picked up in Cairo
a book by an English clergyman, whose name I have now forgotten, who
described a trip up the Nile, and in an appendix to his volume gave an
account of his bird collection. I wish I could remember the name of the
author now, for I owe that book very much. Without it I should have been
collecting entirely in the dark, whereas with its aid I could generally
find out what the birds were. My first knowledge of Latin was obtained
by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I
collected and classified by the aid of such books as this one.
The birds I obtained up the Nile and in Palestine represented merely the
usual boy's collection. Some years afterward I gave them, together with
the other ornithological specimens I had gathered, to the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, and I think some of them also to the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. I am told that the skins are to
be found yet in both places and in other public collections. I doubt
whether they have my original labels on them. With great pride the
directors of the "Roosevelt Museum," consisting of myself and the two
cousins aforesaid, had printed a set of Roosevelt Museum labels in pink
ink preliminary to what was regarded as my adventurous trip to Egypt.
This bird-collecting gave what was really the chief zest to my Nile
journey. I was old enough and had read enough to enjoy the temples and
the desert scenery and the general feeling of romance; but this in time
would have palled if I had not also had the serious work of collecting
and preparing my specimens. Doubtless the family had their moments of
suffering--especially on one occasion when a well-meaning maid extracted
from my taxidermist's outfit the old tooth-brush with which I put on
the skins the arsenical soap necessary for their preservation, partially
washed it, and left it with the rest of my wash kit for my own personal
use. I suppose that all growing boys tend to be grubby; but the
ornithological small boy, or indeed the boy with the taste for natural
history of any kind, is generally the very grubbiest of all. An added
element in my case was the fact that while in Egypt I suddenly started
to grow. As there were no tailors up the Nile, when I got back to Cairo
I needed a new outfit. But there was one suit of clothes too good to
throw away, which we kept for a "change," and which was known as my
"Smike suit," because it left my wrists and ankles as bare as those of
poor Smike himself.
When we reached Dresden we younger children were left to spend the
summer in the house of Herr Minckwitz, a member of either the Municipal
or the Saxon Government--I have forgotten which. It was hoped that in
this way we would acquire some knowledge of the German language and
literature. They were the very kindest family imaginable. I shall never
forget the unwearied patience of the two daughters. The father and
mother, and a shy, thin, student cousin who was living in the flat,
were no less kind. Whenever I could get out into the country I collected
specimens industriously and enlivened the household with hedge-hogs
and other small beasts and reptiles which persisted in escaping from
partially closed bureau drawers. The two sons were fascinating students
from the University of Leipsic, both of them belonging to dueling corps,
and much scarred in consequence. One, a famous swordsman, was called
_Der Rothe Herzog_ (the Red Duke), and the other was nicknamed _Herr
Nasehorn_ (Sir Rhinoceros) because the tip of his nose had been cut off
in a duel and sewn on again. I learned a good deal of German here,
in spite of myself, and above all I became fascinated with the
Nibelungenlied. German prose never became really easy to me in the sense
that French prose did, but for German poetry I cared as much as for
English poetry. Above all, I gained an impression of the German people
which I never got over. From that time to this it would have been quite
impossible to make me feel that the Germans were really foreigners.
The affection, the _Gemuthlichkeit_ (a quality which cannot be exactly
expressed by any single English word), the capacity for hard work, the
sense of duty, the delight in studying literature and science, the pride
in the new Germany, the more than kind and friendly interest in three
strange children--all these manifestations of the German character and
of German family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did
not in the least define at the time, but which is very vivid still forty
years later.
When I got back to America, at the age of fifteen, I began serious study
to enter Harvard under Mr. Arthur Cutler, who later founded the Cutler
School in New York. I could not go to school because I knew so much less
than most boys of my age in some subjects and so much more in others. In
science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German
and French I was strong, but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and
mathematics. My grandfather had made his summer home in Oyster Bay a
number of years before, and my father now made Oyster Bay the summer
home of his family also. Along with my college preparatory studies I