The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-06-07
SELF MASTERY
 HIS THEME,
Roosevelt Lectures on BiOIOg-
 icaI Ana|Ogies.
GUEST OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY

UUEOi UT UATU UnU UHlHEhSIl ! Growth and Decay of Civilization.
 The Birth Rate Question-CaIls
 England Greateet Empire and De-
 clares the Man Who Tries Is One
 Worth While.
 London, June 7.-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt delivered today the follow ing lecture on Biological Analogies In History at Oxford university:
 An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received speaks in this university of ancient re nown cannot but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm o1 his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities and all the memories that make them great are living reali- ties in the minds of scores of thou sands of men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands.
 Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My peo- pie have been for eight generations in America, but in one thing I am like the Americans of tomorrow rather than like many of the Americans of today, for have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnfc makeup of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to be- come more and more akin to that of those Americans who, like myself, are of the old stock, but not mainly of Nnglish atook.
 Yet I thini. that as time goes by mu- tual respect ' znderstanding and sym pathy among ] the English speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or HuGuenot, Scotehman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in ''the spa cious days of great Elizabeth" would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel.
 PaIeontolosy, History.
 When dealing with the changes. cata- clysmic or otherwise, which divide one period of chronological history from another we can sometimes assign causes and again we cannot even guess at them. In the case of single species or of faunas of very restricted locaIi- ties the explanations is often self evi- dent. xsAP~ @-
 A comparatively slight change in the amount of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in vegeta- ton, night readily mean the destruc- ton of group of huge herbivores with bodily size such that they need ed vasts quantity of food and with teeth SO weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds of. plants could fur nish this food.
 Again, VI now know that the most deadly foes of the higher forms of life are various lower forms of life, such as insects or microscopic creatures into the blood by insects. There are districts in South America where. many large animals, wild and cannot live because of the presence either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies.
 In Africa there Is terrible genus of poison fly, each species acting as the host of microscopic creatures which are deadly sto certain of the higher vertebTat0S. One of these species, though harmless to man, is fatal to aH domestic animals, and this although harmless to the closely related wild kinsfSik Of these animals.
 Another Is fatal to man himself, be- Ing the cause of the sleeping sick ness," which in many large districts has Killed out the entire population Of course the development or the ex- tension of the range of any such tn- sects and any one of many other causes which we see actually at work around us would readily account for Inc destruction of some given species pr even for the destruction of sew eral species in a limited area of coun- ry.
 When whole faunal groups die out over large areas the question is diff ferent and may or may not be suscep- dble of explanation with the knowl- ,dge we actually possess.
 In the old arctogeal continent, for instance, in what is now Europe, Asia md North America, the glacial period made a complete but, of course, ex- plicable change in the faunal life of he region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied fauna. Then ! period of great cold supervened, and ! different fauna succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is ob- vfous.
 Death" of Civilization.
 When we speak of the death" of Tfbe, a nation or a civilization the erm may be used for either one or TWO totally different processes, the lnalogy with what occurs in biological history being complete. Certain tribes If savages-the Tasmanians, for in- various little clans of American Indians have within the last century or two completely died out. All If the individuals have perished. eaving no descendants, and the blood las disappeared.
 Certain other tribes of Indians have