404 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1892. 



Quite as good is the young - Ancistrodon in the collection, for here, too, 

 the snake is partly within a recess and fully the anterior fourth of the 

 animal free. 



Errors can sometimes occur, however, even in apparently such a sim- 

 ple procedure as properly coiling - up a snake for a plaster cast, and as 

 tine a work of art as it is in other respects, I am inclined to think that 

 in nature a snake never so abruptly bends the neck as close to the head 

 as lias been done for the one in Plate xxx. A dead snake may be placed 

 in a great many postures which in nature it never assumes, and these 

 dead attitudes must be guarded against; and it is just here where the 

 results of good photographs of snakes in nature come in most advan- 

 tageously. 



In the coloring' of snakes and other reptiles we should rely solely 

 upon specimens that are alive, and taken as subjects if possible just 

 after the " shed." It is almost needless to add that a cast should only 

 be painted from the snake from which the cast was made, and not 

 another specimen of the same species. Frogs, for some reason or other, 

 are not always well drawn and colored, and, as I have before re- 

 marked, some of the most abominable stuffed specimens and casts of 

 them are in existence. Those in some of our museums bear no closer 

 resemblance to the original animal than a camel does to a chestnut 

 burr. They are simply horrid. This is often the case, too, in many 

 departments of decorative art. Even our Indians, who occasionally 

 make pretty good hits, crude as they are, at pictorial decoration with 

 some of the animals they happen to be most familiar with, miss it 

 when they try the frog. Attempts made by the Japanese in such mat- 

 ters are often very much better than the results turned out by the 

 brushes aud implements of our own artists and designers. There is one 

 very life-like plaster-of-Paris cast, colored, of this Batrachian in the 

 collections of the National Museum, and it is reproduced in Plate xxxi 

 of the present paper. It shows the animal in one of its most common 

 poses, and may well serve as a model for anyone who desires to copy 

 it for any purpose whatsoever. 



Some grand results in the matter of the casting of turtles, both large 

 and small ones, have been accomplished in the workshops of the 

 Museum. These are either in plaster-of-Paris like all the specimens 

 here figured, or in some few cases the natural shell of the animal has 

 been retained, and the exposed external parts, as head, legs, and tail, 

 cast in the usual plastic material used, and subsequently fitted to the 

 former. When cast in plaster-of-Paris, they of course have to be painted, 

 as in the case of all animals so reproduced. When photographed, 

 these tints do not show, and consequently my figures, with the par- 

 tial exception of the box tortoise (Gistudo), exhibit only the form of 

 the specimen. 



Especial attention is invited to the beautiful cast of Aspidonectes 

 Plate xxxit, which is not more than one-sixth the linear length of the 



