“Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me banged Ellies head &c.”
But in Paris the trip becomes too monotonous; and his diary says:
November 26. “I stayed in the house all day, varying the day with brushing my hair, washing my hands and thinking in fact having a verry dull time.”
November 27. “I did the same thing as yesterday.”
They all came back to New York and again he could study and amuse himself with natural history. This study was one of his great pleasures throughout life and when he was a man he knew more about the animals of America than anybody except the great scholars who devoted their lives to this alone.
It started with a dead seal that he happened to find laid out on a slab in a market in Broadway. He was still a small boy, but when he heard that the seal had been killed in the harbor, it reminded him of the adventures he had been reading about in Mayne Reid’s books. He went back to the market, day after day, to look at the seal, to try to measure it and to plan to own it and preserve it. He did get the skull, and with two cousins started what they gave the grand name of the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History"!
Catching and keeping specimens for this museum gave him more fun than it gave to some of his family. His mother was not well pleased when she found some young white mice in the ice-chest, where the founder of the “Roosevelt Museum” was keeping them safe. She quickly threw them away, and her son, in his indignation, said that what hurt him about it was “the loss to Science! The loss to Science!” Once, he and his cousin had been out in the country, collecting specimens until all their pockets were full. Then two toads came along,—such novel and attractive toads that room had to be made for them. Each boy put one toad under his hat, and started down the road. But a lady, a neighbor, met them, and when the boys took off their hats, the toads did what any sensible toads would do, hopped down and away, and so were never added to the Museum.
The Roosevelt family visited Europe again in 1873, and afterwards went to Algiers and Egypt, where the air, it was hoped, would help the boy’s asthma. This was a pleasanter trip for him, and the birds which he saw on the Nile interested him greatly.
His studies of natural history had been carried on in the summers at Oyster Bay on Long Island, on the Hudson and in the Adirondacks. They soon became more than a boy’s fun, and some of the observations made when he was fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years old have found their way into learned books. When the State of New York published, many years afterwards, two big volumes about the birds of the state, some of these early writings by Roosevelt were quoted as important. A friend has given me a four-page folder printed in 1877, about the summer birds of the Adirondacks “by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and H. D. Minot.” Part of the observations were made in 1874 when he was sixteen. Ninety-seven different birds are listed.
When he was fifteen and had returned a second time from Europe, he began to study to enter Harvard. He was ahead of most boys of his age in science, history and geography and knew something of German and French. But he was weak in Latin, Greek and mathematics. He loved the out-of-doors side of natural history, and hoped he might be a scientist like Audubon.