The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [43]
Indeed, Roosevelt’s illustration most assuredly was modeled after the frontpiece of the eminent naturalist Thomas Huxley’s 1863 Evidence of Man’s Place in Nature, which showed, in sequence, a gibbon slowly evolving into man. Huxley had worked tirelessly to help decipher the 500-page On the Origin of Species for a mass audience, distilling complicated scientific facts for the comprehension of the general public.64
Humorous aspects of the drawing aside, as of 1873 Roosevelt was dead serious about spending his life as a faunal naturalist (or biological explorer). After all, there were naturalist mysteries to be solved on this little-known planet earth. Religious leaders had long argued over the origin and development of life. Now Darwin and Huxley had provided an answer. Bursting with the enthusiasm of a convert, Roosevelt swallowed natural selection hook, line, and sinker. For the rest of his life, in fact, he used evolutionary theory as his guiding light; it illuminated his views on everything from politics to geography to fatherhood.65
CHAPTER THREE
OF SCIENCE, FISH, AND ROBERT B. ROOSEVELT
I
No photographic images exist of the fifteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt with his trunkful of bird booty, on board the S.S. Russia and anxious to arrive at New York Harbor. Shortly before sailing home, however, he described in a letter to his mother (who had returned early) how the combination of asthma and mumps had made his face as puffy as “an antiquated woodchuck with his cheeks filled with nuts.”1 Besides homesickness for his Roosevelt Museum and his friends, there was another reason the sickly Theodore was eager to return to New York. While the Roosevelts were in the Middle East and Europe, a new family mansion had been constructed at 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street—near Central Park and much closer to the American Museum of Natural History. Young Theodore couldn’t wait to see the new house and unpack his bee-eaters, wagtails, bullfinches, and other specimens in the space especially assigned to his Roosevelt Museum. To Roosevelt the new home meant bigger and better display space for his painstakingly acquired wildlife specimens. His Roosevelt Museum was now three or four times larger than before. Each new bird added was assigned an inventory tag, including its Latin binomial.2 “My first knowledge of Latin,” Roosevelt later recalled of his childhood, “was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I collected.”3
Roosevelt studied Carolus Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum and Systemae Naturae to help himself learn the binomial system. Naturalists revered Linnaeus as their patron saint because in the mid-eighteenth century he had created this simple, universal two-part Latin nomenclature, which revolutionized taxonomy. Thanks to Linnaeus, botanists and zoologists everywhere could use the same language when discussing species. Rejecting previous assumptions about the “subjective value of perfection of animals,” Linnaeus based his sytem on “objective, observed similarities in anatomical structure.”4 His system of biological classification—still used—was developed with a sense of cataloging God’s creatures. Honoring all life-forms with both a genus and a species name, Linnaeus also placed humans in his binomial system, as Homo sapiens (the term for man beginning in the Pleistocene epoch 1.8 million years ago). By the time Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, scientists and explorers seeking glory ranged far and wide in the remote wilderness, racing to discover organisms that could be named after themselves. “The Linnaean system eliminated the confusion of having, for example, a butterfly called the mourning cloak in the United States, the yellow edge in Canada, and the Camberwell beauty in Britain,” Nancy Pick explains in The Rarest of the Rare. “People all over the world, whatever