The American Museum Journal 



Volume XIV 



FEBRUARY, 1914 



Number 2 



THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS 



Part II 

 By Frederic A. Lucas 



ONCE admitted into museums, a 

 precedent established, and in- 

 trenched behind the bulwarks 

 of high scientific authority, groups 

 slowly found their way into all muse- 

 ums and their scope extended to all 

 branches of natural history as fast as 

 opportunity offered and the skill of the 

 preparator would permit. Birds lend 

 themselves more readily to groups than 

 does any other class of animals; they 

 combine beauty of form, pose and color 

 with moderate size that permits ease of 

 handling. Hence birds naturally were 

 chosen for the first museum groups and 

 bird groups still predominate. 



Just as naturally mammals followed 

 birds and from mice to elephants have 

 furnished many notable groups and 

 many triumphs — and failures — for the 

 taxidermist. After mammals came any- 

 thing that the taxidermist or modeler 

 could master — reptiles, fishes, insects and 

 other invertebrates, and last of all plants, 

 which copied by modern methods are 

 ever green and may be made to show 

 their adaptations to environment and 

 interrelations to varying conditions of 

 soil, climate and surroundings. 



Yea, the group idea has even been 

 carried into the dim and distant past 

 and in the hall of fossils one may behold 

 a ghostly group of great ground sloths. 



or farther on, Allosaurus feeding upon 

 Brontosaurus. And the ground sloths 

 passed out of existence thousands of 

 years ago and Allosaurus has not felt the 

 pangs of hunger for over six million 

 years ! 



Fishes offer some of the most difficult 

 problems ; not only does their expression 

 depend almost entirely upon their atti- 

 tudes, but in many cases there is little of 

 interest in their habits or small beauty 

 in their surroundings, when they have 

 any. And added to all these things is 

 the ever present difficulty of making a 

 fish suspended in air look as though he 

 were swimming in water. Furthermore 

 in the character of their integument, 

 fishes and amphibians furnish a practi- 

 cally insurmountable problem in the way 

 of mounting, which has led to much 

 friendly discussion as to whether it is 

 better to show a stuffed specimen that 

 does not at all resemble the living animal 

 or a cast that cannot be distinguished 

 from it. 



In this instance the writer is entirely 

 on the side of those who offer "some- 

 thing just as good," believing firmly that 

 the object of exhibits is to hold the mirror 

 up to nature and let it reflect an image of 

 nature as she looks when alive, not as 

 she appears when dead and shriveled. 

 And if a cloth leaf and a glass eye are 



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