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.

It is important to know what he thought and did about self-defense and fighting.  Many people dodge this, and other difficult subjects, when they are talking to boys.  It was not Roosevelt’s way to hide his thoughts in silence because of timidity, and then call his lack of action by some such fine name as “tact” or “discretion.”  When there was good reason for speaking out he always did so.  Since a boy who is forever fighting is not only a nuisance, but usually a bully, some older folk go to the extreme and tell boys that all fighting is wrong.

Theodore Roosevelt did not believe it.  When he was about fourteen, and riding in a stage-coach on the way to Moosehead Lake, two other boys in the coach began tormenting him.  When he tried to fight them off, he found himself helpless.  Either of them could handle him, could hit him and prevent him from hitting back.  He decided that it was a matter of self-respect for a boy to know how to protect himself and he learned to box.

Speaking to boys he said later: 

“One prime reason for abhorring cowards is because every good boy should have it in him to thrash the objectionable boy as the need arises.”

And again: 

“The very fact that the boy should be manly and able to hold his own, that he should be ashamed to submit to bullying, without instant retaliation, should in return, make him abhor any form of bullying, cruelty, or brutality.”

[Footnote:  These two quotations from essay called “The American Boy” in “The Strenuous Life,” pp. 162, 164]