July, 1894. SOME NEW BOOKS. 59 



biology and anatomy. The taxidermist should be, besides, a good 

 field naturalist, a careful observer of nature and of the habits of 

 animals, a botanist, a topographer, and an artist. The importance 

 of photography is fully insisted upon, and Dr. Shufeldt considers a 

 perfect knowledge of the art and practice of photography more useful 

 perhaps than anything else. He says: "No taxidermist who has any 

 regard for an attainment of excellence in his calling should neglect 

 to make good photographs of all the living animals that he can, and 

 that upon every possible opportunity. This should not be confined 

 to wild animals alone, but to all the domestic ones in their most 

 common attitudes." 



Passing on to the true object of his paper, the criticism and 

 explanation of stuffed or modelled specimens of natural history 

 objects. Dr. Shufeldt refers to the beautiful gelatine casts, taken 

 from plaster moulds, of the octopus, squid, and other soft-bodied 

 invertebrates, shown at the Chicago Exposition, photographs of which 

 he reproduces in support of his words. Noting the difiiculties of the 

 proper preservation of fishes, he mentions the remarkable collection 

 of preserved fish in the Government Museum at Madras, which 

 Hornaday referred to as the finest of its kind in existence. The 

 lamentable aspect of fishes in alcohol and the further distortion pro- 

 duced by the jars in which they are usually preserved is noted. The 

 advantage of making plaster casts, properly coloured, is insisted 

 upon, and emphasised by photographs of some beautiful examples in 

 the U.S. National Museum. The "Buckland" fishes will be 

 remembered by most readers of this article, and the successful 

 preparations made by Mr. Montagu Browne in more recent years. 

 In our own Museum at South Kensington, we see an attempt to 

 replace the ordinary museum fish with some more lifelike stuffed 

 examples, but the use of plaster or the Browne methods might be 

 more largely employed to advantage in both the Zoological and 

 Geological Galleries. Dr. Shufeldt says, speaking of rays, that 

 the plaster and gelatine methods are so successful with these fish 

 that, properly coloured, it would be difficult to distinguish between 

 photographs of the living fish, the plaster, and the gelatine cast, if 

 they were all taken on the same scale and under the same conditions. 

 In all his statements, too, the reproduction of photographs of fish- 

 models fully bear him out. 



Some half-dozen photographs of beautiful plaster casts of snakes 

 are reproduced, of which the rattlesnake, in a hole in the rocks, 

 is wonderfully true to nature. Indeed, in these animals it is difficult 

 to see why anything else but plaster casts of excellence should be 

 shown in public galleries, so true is the cast, and so difficult is it to 

 properly stuff the creature itself. The reproductions of photo- 

 graphs of stuffed birds have by far the largest space allotted to them, 

 and they form an exceedingly interesting collection. Examples are 

 given of correctly and incorrectly stuffed auks, gulls and penguins, of 

 a scolding parrot, a parrot on the defensive, of game cocks and hens, 

 a pigeon preening the breast feathers, a quail elevating feathers 

 prior to shaking, and also in the act of walking, of owls, and various 

 groups of birds, including, as before mentioned, some in our own 

 Museum, of rare excellence. 



In the Mammalia, examples are given of kangaroo properly and 

 improperly stuffed, a group of armadilioes, a porpoise, gazelles, a 

 group of Bison amcjicnniis, the head of a zebra of remarkable excellence, 

 jack rabbit, head of a tiger, and many more which we are unable 

 to refer to. 



