"effete East," meaning that the East is worn out and corrupt, had
best remember that Abraham Lincoln did not believe that when he
sent his son to the same college which Theodore Roosevelt's father
chose for him.

At Harvard he kept up his studies and interest in natural history.
In the house where he lived he sometimes had a large, live turtle
and two or three kinds of snakes. He went in to Boston and came
back with a basket full of live lobsters, to the consternation of
the other people in the horse-car. He held a high office in the
Natural History Society, and took honors, when he graduated, in
the subject. His father had encouraged his desire to be a
professor of natural history, reminding him, however, that he must
have no hopes of being a rich man. In the end he gave up this
plan, not because it did not lead to money, for never in his life
did he work to become wealthy, but because he disliked science as
it was then taught. One of the bad things the German universities
had done to the American colleges was to make them worship fussy
detail, and so science had become a matter of microscopes and
laboratories. The field-work of the naturalist was unknown or
despised.

He took part in four or five kinds of athletics. He seems never to
have played baseball, perhaps because of poor eyesight which made
him wear glasses. But he practiced with a rifle, rowed and boxed,
ran and wrestled. In his vacations he went hunting in Maine.
Boxing was one of his favorite forms of sport,--for two reasons.
He thought a boy or a man ought to be able to defend himself and
others, and he enjoyed hard exercise.