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of his youthful enthusiasm for wildlife and domestic animals.59 No longer was it enough to record seeing “snipes” homologies were now equally important to him. The variations between the great snipe (Gallinago media) and the common snipe (G. gallinago), for example, made all the difference in the world. The time had arrived, Roosevelt believed, for him to understand the biological reasons that some birds had nonfunctioning wings whereas hummingbirds couldn’t stop flapping theirs. “We behold the faces of nature bright with greatness,” Darwin had written, but “we forget the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey.”60

Theodore Roosevelt drew Darwinian evolutionary ideas using his family as natural selection case studies. This illustration—one of a series—was done on September 21, 1873, while he was in Dresden, Germany. He was fourteen years old.

T.R.’s Darwin evolution drawings. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

In On the Origin of Species, unlike Missionary Travels, there were no lavish illustrations, no photographs of great zebra herds or wallowing hippopotamuses. Just carefully reading the text, however, became something of a personal benediction to Roosevelt. Enhancing Darwin’s allure were profiles of the British explorer-naturalist that appeared in popular boys’ magazines. It was also exciting that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln—young Roosevelt’s two idols—had both been born on February 22, 1803; this is the kind of coincidence children love. Like young Theodore studying under John Bell, Darwin once had a taxidermy apprenticeship with John Edmonston, an escaped West Indian slave who moved to Scotland. And, just as Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., had helped create the American Museum of Natural History, Darwin’s paternal grandfather had written Zoonomia (1794–1796), which dealt with transmutation. It was as if zoology was in the bloodlines of both Roosevelt and Darwin. An admonition Darwin’s father had once shouted at young Charles could very well have been blurted out in the Roosevelt household: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”61 Maybe someday, Roosevelt hoped, he too would be lucky enough to catch rats on a ship around the world like the Beagle, all in the name of natural history.*

Taxidermist, illustrator, diarist, voracious reader, hunter, ornithologist, mammalogist, animal rights advocate, naturalist, and now Darwinian evolutionist, Roosevelt—all of fourteen years old—was über-precocious. Taken together, all these sides indicated a deep appreciation of wild-life, and an understanding of how little biologists understood about the living world. “When I was young I fell into the usual fashion of those days and collected ‘specimens’ industriously, thereby committing an entirely needless butchery of our ordinary birds,” Roosevelt wrote to his hunting friend Philip Stewart as vice president of the United States in 1901. “I am happy to say that there has been a great change for the better since then in our ways of looking at these things.”62

When we go through the ruck of evidence about Roosevelt’s childhood, in fact, one document stands out. In whimsical letters written from Dresden to his mother and sister Bamie, T.R. drew charts showing Darwin’s evolutionary theory in terms of the Roosevelt family’s genealogy. Done in a young person’s hand, the illustration resembled what today would be called “outsider art” or a doodle on the back of an envelope. It was presented to mother as “Some illustrations on the Darwinian theory,” broken down into four stages. T.R. demonstrated how, as a close reader of Darwin’s work, he personally could have actually evolved from a Dresden stork—the kind that the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen popularized in a fairy tale. Theodore, in fact, was so enamored of these long-legged