The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [22]
Even in these early years, his knowledge of natural history was abnormal. No doubt much of it was acquired during his winters in the “tassel chair,” but it was supplemented, every summer, by long hours of observation of the flora and fauna around him. The other children noticed that their leader “also led a life apart from us, seriously studying birds, their habits and their notes.”59 At first this study was haphazard, and Teedie made no attempt to document his observations, beyond filing them in his retentive memory. Not until he was seven years old, and back in New York City, did his formal career as a zoologist begin.
I was walking up Broadway, and as I passed the market to which I used sometimes to be sent before breakfast to get strawberries, I suddenly saw a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood. That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure. I asked where it was killed, and was informed in the harbor … As long as that seal remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal. This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague aspirations of in some way or another owning that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however, I did get the seal’s skull, and with two of my cousins promptly started what we ambitiously called the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.”60
His next major thesis was entitled “The Foregoing Ant.” According to Corinne, it was inspired by a passing reference in Wood’s Natural History. Teedie assumed that the adjective was physiological, perhaps referring to the ant’s gait, and his subsequent essay on the subject was read aloud to a circle of mystified adults.61
Unfortunately for posterity, neither the Broadway Seal nor the Foregoing Ant appear in surviving records of Teedie’s museum. There exists, however, a rather more learned opus, entitled “Natural History on Insects,” which dates from his ninth year. “All the insects that I write about in this book,” the author declares, “inhabbit North America. Now and then a friend has told me something about them but mostly I have gained their habbits from ofserv-a-tion.” He discusses and illustrates various species of ants, spiders, lady-bugs, fireflies, horned “beetlles,” and dragonflies. Then, with a fine disregard for the limitations of his title, he moves on to the study of hawks, minnows, and crayfish. The latter rather defeats his childish powers of description: “Look at a lobster,” he suggests, “and you have its form.”62
Apart from such lapses, Teedie’s “ofserv-a-tion” is amazingly keen. A paragraph on the tree-spider, for example, notes that it is “grey spoted with black,” and lives “in communitys of about 20” under patches of loosened bark; its web “looks exactly like some cotten on the top but if you take that off you will see