When I returned to America in 1911, my mind saturated with the beauty and the wonder of the continent I had left, I was dreaming of African Hall. One year later my ideas were sufficiently defined to be laid before Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, who approved my plans and asked that they be presented to the Trustees of the Museum. The plan that I proposed to the Trustees provided for a great hall devoted entirely to Africa, which should put in permanent and artistic form a satisfying record of fast-disappearing fauna and give a comprehensive view of the topography of the continent by means of a series of groups constructed in the best museum technique. Neither in this nor in any other country has such an exhibit been attempted. Not only would the proposed hall preserve a unique record of African wild life, but it would also establish a standard for museum exhibition in the future.
The Trustees approved my plan for immediate execution; the undertaking was to go forward as rapidly as funds were available. One of the old North American mammal halls, rechristened the "elephant studio," because there the mounting of the elephant group was already under way, was retained for my use and there, to crystallize my conception, I made a model of the African Hall. This model represents a great unobstructed hall, in the centre of which stands a statuesque group of four African elephants with a group of rhinos at either end. Both on the ground floor and in the gallery, with windows seeming
