A NEW ART BEGUN 5 
stimulating to a man’s soul turned out at that time 
to have very little science and no art at all. 
The reason for this was not so much that no one 
knew better. It was more the fact that no one would 
pay for better work. Professor Ward had to set a 
price on his work that the museums would pay, and 
at that time most museums were interested almost 
exclusively in the collection of purely scientific data 
and cared little for exhibitions that would appeal to 
the public. They preferred collections of birds’ skins 
to bird groups, and collections of mammal data and 
skeletons to mammal groups. The museums then 
had no taxidermists of their own. 
However, many of the prominent museum men of 
to-day had their early training at Ward’s Natural 
Science Establishment. Soon after I went to Ward’s 
another nineteen-year-old boy named William Mor- 
ton Wheeler, now of the Bussey Institution at Har- 
vard, turned up there. E. N. Gueret, now in charge 
of the Division of Osteology in the Field Museum of 
Natural History, George K. Cherrie, the South 
American explorer; the late J. William Critchley, who 
became the chief taxidermist in the Brooklyn Museum 
of Arts and Sciences; Henry L. Ward, director of the 
Kent Scientific Museum in Grand Rapids; H. C. 
Denslow, an artist formerly associated with several 
of the leading museums as bird taxidermist; William 
T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zodlogical 
Park, and Frederick S. Webster, who was the first 
president of the Society of American Taxidermists, 
were all among the friends I made in those early days. 
