It is customary in Latin countries for a would-be author or orator to
endeavour, at the beginning of his book or his speech, to establish
his status. Possibly I have become partially Latinized as the result
of some eighteen years of residence in the Philippines. At all events
it is my purpose to state at the outset facts which will tend to
make clear my view point and at the same time briefly to outline the
subject-matter which I hereinafter discuss.

As a boy I went through several of the successive stages of collector's
fever from which the young commonly suffer. First it was postage
stamps; then birds' nests, obtained during the winter season when no
longer of use to their builders. Later I was allowed to collect eggs,
and finally the birds themselves. At one time my great ambition was to
become a taxidermist. My family did not actively oppose this desire
but suggested that a few preliminary years in school and college
might prove useful.

I eventually lost my ambition to be a taxidermist but did not lose my
interest in zoölogy and botany. While a student at the University of
Michigan I specialized in these subjects. I was fortunate in having
as one of my instructors Professor Joseph B. Steere, then at the
head of the Department of Zoölogy. Professor Steere, who had been a
great traveller, at times entertained his classes with wonderfully
interesting tales of adventure on the Amazon and in the Andes, Peru,
Formosa, the Philippines and the Dutch Moluccas. My ambition was
fired by his stories and when in the spring of 1886 he announced his
intention of returning to the Philippines the following year to take
up and prosecute anew zoölogical work which he had begun there in
1874, offering to take with him a limited number of his students who