From David Samuels’s essay “Wild Things: Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos” in the June 2012 Harper’s magazine:
[p. 30] On March 24, 1897, Mayor William Strong granted a tract of South Bronx Park to Madison Grant and his New York Zoological Society … Grant selected William Temple Hornaday, at that time the most famous conservationist in America, as the zoo’s director … To build and maintain the collections, Grant chose Henry Fairfield Osborn, a notably pompous and deceitful man who served as the head of vertebrate palentology at the American Museum of Natural History and sponsored the excursion to Montana that discovered the frst fossilized remains of a lordly predator that he named Tyrannosaurus rex.
I admire the turn of phrase, “a notably pompous and deceitful man”.
More on Grant to come.
June 7, 2012 at 9:24 am |
[…] Continuing the story of Madison Grant, who helped to found the Bronx Zoo, from David Samuels’s essay “Wild Things: Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos” in the June 2012 Harper’s magazine: the sad tale of Ota Benga. […]