Professor [Bernhard] Rensch influenced me a great deal because I talked with him about these matters and in his book he raised all the problems that would... or at least most of the problems that would occupy my mind in the later years. However, after a while, after I'd gone to America we drifted apart because he developed a number of ideas, as I shall come back to, that were in complete conflict with my own ideas. There were a number of other people at the [Berlin] Museum with whom I had contact and I might emphasise that I was employed as an assistant to the Museum, not an assistant in ornithology. And actually I was assigned to the library and I had to supervise the... all the acquisition of new books and the subscribing to new journals and all this sort of thing. And I was also told to work in another department of the Museum, in this case it was the department of entomology where I was working on beetles in order to learn something about a group of organisms different from the birds that I was up to that time acquainted with. And that occupied me for the next year and a half until I went off on my first expedition.