ir of challenge about the man that I found
unpleasant. Of course I admitted the fact that I was not an explorer
myself, and that mine was the humbler if more tedious task of collecting
and arranging data. At that he said that in his opinion, organized
expeditions were little more than pleasure jaunts taken at the public
expense. His viewpoint was most extraordinary.

"Such an expedition," he said, "must fail in its main purpose because
its very unwieldiness destroys or disperses the very things it was
organized to study. It cannot penetrate the wilds; it cannot get into
the dry lands. The very needs of the men and horses and dogs prevent
that. It must keep to beaten tracks and in touch with the edge of
civilization. The members of such an expedition are mere killers on a
large scale, and to kill or to hunt a thing is to not know it at all.
Further, the men in such expeditions are not hunters even. They are
destroyers who destroy while keeping themselves in safety. They have
their beaters. Their paid natives. Humbug! That's the only word to
describe that kind of thing. Staged effects they have. Then they come
back here to pose as heroes before a crowd of gaping city clerks."

I mentioned the remarkable results obtained by the Peary and Roosevelt
expeditions and pointed to the fact that the specimens brought back and
properly set up by efficient taxidermists, did, in fact, give the common
people some notion of the wonders of animal life.

"Nothing of the kind," he said. "Look at that boa-constrictor you have
out there. It is stuffed and in a glass case. Don't you know that in its
natural surroundings you yourself would come mighty near stepping on one
without seeing it? You would. If you had that thing set up as it should
be, these museum visitors of yours would pass the case believing it was
a mere collection of foliage. They wouldn't see the snake itself. See
what I mean? Set up as they are in real life they'd come near being
invisible."

The man walked up and down the study floor for half a minute or so, then
paused at the desk and said:

"Don't let us get to entertaining one another though. But remember this,
you only get knowledge at a cost. I mean to say that the man that would
know something, can only get the knowledge at first hand. The people who
wander around this junk shop that you call a museum, go out as empty
headed as they came in. Consider. Say a Fiji islander came here and took
back with him from the