'...I knew Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, the President of the Zoological Society, because one of his sons was a schoolmate of mine. To me, a shy fifteen-year-older in those days, he seemed very awesome, but one Saturday afternoon he did something which enriched my life more than he ever realized. On this occasion he sat down beside me in the train going back from the Bronx to Grand Central Station. He asked me what I had been reading and then said, 'There are four great books for boys who like natural history.' And he named them: Wallace's Malay Archipelago, Belt's The Naturalist in Nicaragua, Bates's book on the Amazon, and Hudson's on the La Plata region. Well, I read them in this order. Wallace's book, coming first, made the greatest impression; I read it over and over again until I knew it almost by heart. And my desire to see the Dutch East Indies became so all-consuming that I must have seemed a veritable monomaniac to my parents.'

THOMAS BARBOUR

NATURALIST AT LARGE, 1943