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by an uncle, a cousin, or a adult friend. (Darwin at this time was said to be talked about more than read.) Somewhat pretentiously, catching the rising wind, Theodore now began imitating the great evolutionary theorist, talking in Darwinspeak about animal variation and natural selection, one of the basic mechanisms of evolution along with genetic drift, migration, and mutation. What was exciting about Darwin was that he was a scientist and an explorer; he thereby met Captain Reid’s criterion for greatness while epitomizing modernity in science. Next, Theodore read The Descent of Man, in which he learned that Homo sapiens had evolved from apes, shrews, and birds. The effect of reading these books was that Roosevelt began to sound like the character in Henry James’s The Madonna of the Future who breathlessly said, “Cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—all human life is there!”52 Roosevelt, in fact, held to Darwin’s belief that men were biological relatives of apes until his dying day.53

More than anything else, Darwin offered the young Roosevelt the philosophy of biology. Darwin was part of the first generation ever to revolt against Aristotle’s concept of scala naturae, the story of a man’s march to perfection.54 What Roosevelt grew to appreciate about Darwin was that he described geological events and natural selection in historical terms. Evolutionists also embraced the notion that nothing was predetermined; everything was adaptive. In one swoop Darwin erased determinism from the blackboard of human collective experience. Roosevelt was not very good at physics but had a fine grasp of history. He took comfort in mathematical facts, not supernaturalism. Basically, he saw Darwin as explaining the history of the world in an orchard, a finch, a tortoise, or a desert. Darwin even offered possible answers for the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.

Writing to Oliver Wendell Holmes just before the 1904 presidential election (which he won), Roosevelt explained why Darwin was the force in the “tremendous intellectual revolution” of their time. Beaming himself thousands of years into the future, Roosevelt predicted that Darwin’s work would have an unparalleled “position in history” and that it would have been “superseded by the work of the very men to whom it pointed out the way.”55

Roosevelt in 1873—nearly thirty years before becoming president—had already decided to become a foot soldier in the Darwinian “revolution of natural history.” Darwin had looked “with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists” who could understand creation from an evolutionary perspective—and he found a willing volunteer in Roosevelt. As Roosevelt later wrote, Darwin had “originality” going for him, unlike those “well meaning little creatures at universities” who were “only fit for microscopic work in the laboratory.”56 The time had come, Darwin had said, for modern biology to lead the way toward enlightenment. “When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension,” Darwin wrote, “when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting—I speak from experience—does the study of natural history become!”57

Careful to avoid taxonomic errors, Roosevelt began tagging the yellow wagtails and pelicans he shot. He tried to record each bird’s most minute distinguishing traits. He was particularly proud of an Egyptian plover he collected and mounted.58 Whenever he struggled to identify and classify the birds he killed, the Reverend Alfred Charles Smith’s The Attractions of the Nile and Its Banks, a Journal of Travel in Egypt and Nubia would help. In fact, young Theodore’s Middle East diary marks the professionalization