Natural Historians

Just as the brothers Roosevelt were sailing home last week after their natural historical expedition into Tibet and Turkestan for the Field Museum of Chicago; just as the Roosevelts' head naturalist and taxidermist, George K. Cherrie, landed at Boston with photographs of bearded, turbaned Roosevelts, with wild tales of riding surly, pack-yaks, and with first-hand news of the 750 birds and 250 animals "of great scientific value" that they had collected, including spiral-horned Ovis poll (Marco Polo sheep), goitered gazelles, shaggy ibexes, shaggier Asian bears, long-haired tigers and smaller, rarer fauna, scarce or unknown in U. S. museums; just as James Simpson, president of Marshall Field & Co. (Chicago department store), was congratulating himself and being congratulated that the expedition he had financed was a complete success and a great contribution to natural science; just at this point, last week, the Smithsonian Institution made an announcement from Washington:

"The greatest live game collecting expedition ever attempted" had been planned, financed, prepared and was ready to start for African jungles. There was no Roosevelt in command, as there had been on the Field Museum trip and on the Smithsonian expedition of 1909. But there was this about the new expedition: It was, like the Field Museum trip, financed by a noted U. S. business man, by Walter P. Chrysler, whose low-hung, high-speed little motor cars have been darting through the land with wide acclaim in the past three years.

The Smithsonian-Chrysler party was to be led by Dr. William M. Mann, superintendent of the National Zoological Park at Washington. It had come to Mr. Chrysler's ears that disappointed children were in the habit of asking keepers in the Zoo: "Where's the giraffes? Where's a rhinoc'rus?" The answer was, "There aren't any. There isn't even a zebra here." The money that came forth was designated to effect the capture of giraffes, rhinoceroses, zebras and "anything else needed."

The State Department in British East Africa got Britain's permission for an expedition to enter the Tanganyika region. Dr. Mann assembled a large corps of able field naturalists, including Albert J. Loveridge of the Harvard zoology staff, who was for eight years an assistant game warden of the Tanganyika territory. Mechanics at the National Zoo built scores of collapsible crates. Keeper Frank Lowe of the Zoo was bidden along to care for animals captured. It was planned to push inland from Dar-es-Salaam, establish a base camp near the railroad and stay five or six months.

In pitfalls, stockades, snares, nooses, nets, or by killing parents and capturing the young, the following among other denizens of the African continent are to be secured for inspection by the U. S. public and its children: lions and pygmy mice (bumblebee size); black rhinoceroses and hyraxes; giraffes; eland (the Zoo has but one aged cow); sable and pygmy antelope, fringe-eared oryx, topi, hartebeest, bushbuck, kudu, reedbuck, duiker, impalla and. oribi; colobus and Sykes monkeys; leopards, hunting dogs; wild hogs; aardvark and aardwolves, hyenas, caracals, servals, civet cats; the giant python, spitting cobras, puff adders, black mambas, boomslangs (tree snakes); parrots, love birds, giant ground hornbills, fish eagles, secretary birds (snake-killers), brilliant plaintain-eaters, sun-birds and the paradise whydah (whose body is canary size with nine inches of tail); leopard tortoises, monitor lizards (which ravage crocodile nests, eat the eggs), armor-plated pangolins (scaly, ribbon-tongued ant-eater); pottos (small baboon). . . . "There is almost no limit to what might be found," but quality, not quantity, would be the collectors' object.