

PREPARING AND STUFFING ANIMALS. 
studied profoundly ; not less so, indeed, than is required from 
the painter; and he who would succeed in the art of mounting 
animals, must have something nearly approximating to the 
painter in his powers of observation and representation. 
Some writers have attempted to reduce the various attitudes 
assumed by animals to a rule. Conventional arrangements of 
this nature have no counterpart in nature, and must result 
in abortions outrageous to good taste. ‘There is only one rule 
to be followed by those who would follow and represent nature. 
Study the habits of your model, and understand well the 
anatomy of the animal to be reproduced. ‘Then only can you 
hope to impress the natural and life-like character which really 
belongs to it. 
The means of preserving the skins of vertebrated animals 
from insects is now pretty well understood. The Memoirs of 
Duhamel, Pinel, Chaptal, and some others, possess informa- 
tion of great value. To these Dupont has added his own 
practice, to which Swainson, the Bowditches, the late Captain 
Brown, and Mr. Waterton, and some of their more humble 
practical followers, as the Gardeners, Wilson, Cooke, and some 
others, have scarcely left anything undiscovered. And now taxi- 
dermy, in the hands of many men of great ability and obser- 
vation, has reached a point of great perfection. 
I must not forget, in my enumeration of artists, the ad- 
mirable collection of life-like animals which ornamented the 
German section of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Those re- 
markable specimens of the taxidermist’s art were exhibited by 
H. Ploucquet, of Stuttgart, and represented a boar-hunt and a 
stag-hunt of the natural size, and the same in miniature; groups 
and nests of different birds of prey; several hawks pouncing 
upon their prey; numerous groups, in which stuffed animals 
are made to imitate the attitudes and actions of men, with such 
an expression of comic intelligence as will not soon be for- 
gotten by the spectators who gave their attention to the 
subject. They were, perhaps, the most beautiful specimens of 
the art ever produced; at the same time, the mirth-excitine 
groups owed quite as much to the comic invention of the artist 
as to the taxidermist’s art. 
It is almost impossible to estimate the extent to which a 
taste for natural history has been promoted by this art; for if, 
at first, curiosity has been the chief motive which led to its pur- 
suit, that motive has been inevitably followed by a higher one, 
namely, the study of the habits and actions of eatataies which 
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