This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific.

I had vague aspirations of in some way or another owning and preserving that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage.

I think, however, I did get the seal's skull, and with two of my cousins promptly started what we ambitiously called the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History." The collections were at first kept in my room, until a rebellion on the part of the chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities of the household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase in the back hall upstairs.

It was the ordinary small boy's collection of curios, quite incongruous and entirely valueless except from the standpoint of the boy himself.

My father and mother encouraged me warmly in this, as they always did in anything that could give me wholesome pleasure or help to develop me.
The adventure of the seal and the novels of Mayne Reid together strengthened my instinctive interest in natural history.