SCIENTIFIC TAXIDERMY FOR MUSEUMS. 427 



When a person \* rites in such a strain as this I am convinced he has 

 not made himself master of the instrument, and knows but very little 

 about its capabilities. Why, even my very earliest attempts in this 

 line, in the photography of living- and dead mammals in the field, I still 

 claim are of some use, while others of them are highly suggestive. Take 

 the Cynomys or Prairie dog, shown in Plate lxxxiii, Figs. 1 and 2. I 

 made that photograph while the animal stood at the very entrance of his 

 burrow. It was in New Mexico. The relative position of the eye, the 

 ear, and the nose are well shown in Fig. 1, while the prominent cheeks 

 are clearly defined in Fig. 2. Whoever it was that mounted the group 

 of these animals at the National Museum I do not now just remember. It 

 may have been Mr. Hornaday, but whoever it was he did not appreci- 

 ate this prominence of the cheeks in Cynomys, and I must believe that 

 such a figure as here given would have enlightened him on the subject. 



There is another structure that I have noticed that is rarely well 

 preserved, and that is the ears of large hares. These appendages, as 

 1 have studied them in most museum specimens of Lepus, always to me 

 appear to be more or less shrunken. This especially applies to the ears 

 of the American Jackass Rabbits (Plate lxxxiv), and the proper preser- 

 vation of the form, size, and coloration of these is, of course, very impor- 

 tant. All these particulars are well shown in the plate, although it is 

 only a dead animal, it being a photograph I made of one of those hares 

 immediately after I shot it. Another example of the kind is seen in my 

 photograph of a dead Badger ( Plate lxxxyiii). The attitude here shown 

 corresponds exactly with one which, among others, it assumes while in 

 the act of burrowing, and many a person whom I have shown this 

 picture has been deceived by it to the extent of mistaking it for a live 

 specimen. It gives a first-rate idea of the form of the badger's head, 

 position of ears, etc. Had a full series of even such photographs as 

 these been available, or had it been possible for the explorers in foreign 

 climes to have taken with them one of the many highly convenient forms 

 of cameras now manufactured, and used it intelligently, I am quite 

 confident that, had the older taxidermists the ability to avail themselves 

 of the pictures obtained in this way, we should not have had so many 

 abominable things to look at in the cases of our museums, and be told 

 on the labels that this represented that animal, and that this, and so 

 on. Things, for example, like the flying lemur, shown in Plate lxxvii. 

 Horrid is not the name for such work as it represents, and it is a pity 

 that that taxidermist did not have a good photograph of the head of a 

 Galeopithecus, living or dead, when he started in on the specimen. 

 Apart from the head, we see feet that seize nothing, shriveled ears, 

 protruding wires, distorted form — and those 1 eyes! 



There is still another class of cases wherein the camera can be made 

 to do great service, and this is where we meet with an animal given to 

 building for its home a large and cumbersome nest, such as is seen in 

 the N~eotoma group in the collection. With the enterprise now exhibited 



