•SCIENTIFIC TAXIDERMY FOR MUSEUMS. 371 



them to the Mexicans, and the latter have probably practiced it for 

 ages. 



Montezuma, as stated by Cortez, possessed robes covered with the 

 skins of the Trogan and other brilliantly plumaged birds. From the 

 making of these flat skins for personal ornament to the desire to pre- 

 serve in their natural appearance similar forms, as well as other small 

 animals of all kinds, for the ornamentation of habitations, is both easy 

 to be imagined, and very probable what took place. Gradually there 

 was a demand for that kind of work, and it fell to the hands of those 

 most skilled in its performance. They were the early taxidermists. 

 Before specialization was ever dreamed of for the early arts of whatso- 

 ever kind, there always, so history teaches, existed a kind of an affinity 

 bonding more or less closely together, the naturalist, the medical man, 

 and the conservator of the curious in nature. Shakespeare's portrayal 

 of the London apothecary is illustrative of this, within whose 



Needy shop a tortoise bung, 



An alligator stuffed, and other skins 



Of ill-shaped fishes. 



Complete differentiation in certain quarters, in these days of the 

 manhood of those sciences, has not as yet been thoroughly brought 

 about, and even in some of the old German cities of the present time 

 we yet hear of organizations known as " The Society of Naturalists and 

 Physicians," and in some of our own late expeditions made under the 

 auspices of the Government, the duties of " surgeon and naturalist" 

 are relegated to one individual. 



Now, although the mere preserving the skins of animals is an opera 

 tion to be easily traced back through nearly all races of people to the 

 dawn of history, this does not altogether hold true with the "mount- 

 ing" of animals.* 



Taxidermists are quite agreed that this phase of the art is of com- 

 paratively quite modern origin. For instance, Montagu Browne has 

 remarked that — 



Little is known of the beginnings of the practice of the "stuffing" or "setting 

 up" of animals for ornament or for scientific purposes; and it is highly probable, 

 from what we gather from old works of travel or natural history, that the art is not 

 more than some three hundred years old. It was practiced in England towards the 

 end of the seventeenth century, as is proved by the Sloane collection, which in 1725 

 formed the nucleus of the collection of natural history now lodged in the galleries 

 at South Kensington. 



It was not until the middle of last century that any treatise devoted to the prin- 

 ciples of the then little-understood art was published in France, Rea tuner's treatise 

 (1719) being probably the first. This was followed at intervals by others in France 

 and Germany, until the beginning of the present century, when the English began 



* Probably, as Mr. Goode informs me, the oldest museum specimen in existence is 

 a rhinoceros still preserved in the Royal Museum of Vertebrates in Florence. This 

 was for a long time a feature of the Medicean Museum in Florence, and was origi- 

 nally mounted for the museum of Ulysses Aldrovandus in Bologna. It dates from the 

 sixteenth century. 



