A NEW ART BEGUN 9 
nalia, and he was anxious to have these shown in the 
museum. ‘This material we turned into a group of a 
Laplander driving a reindeer over the snow. That 
was fairly successful, and we induced the museum to 
buy a set of skins of orang-outangs, which Charles 
F. Adams, another of my former colleagues at Ward’s, 
had collected in Borneo. We arranged them in a 
group using some bare branches as accessories. 
In making these groups we had had to abandon 
the old straw-rag-and-bone method of stuffing and 
create modelled manikins over which to stretch the 
skins. As soon as this point was reached several 
problems presented themselves, the solution of which 
meant an entirely new era in taxidermy. If a man 
was going to model a realistic manikin for an animal’s 
skin, instead of stuffing the skin with straw, it was 
evident he would have to learn to model. Likewise 
it turned out that, even if a man knew how to model, 
he couldn’t model an animal body sufficiently well 
for the skin to fit it unless he knew animal anatomy. 
And we found out also that making a manikin from 
a model was not as simple as it sounds, but that on 
the contrary it isabout as difficult as casting in bronze, 
the difference being that the art of bronze casting has 
been developed through many years, while the art of 
making manikins had to be created comparatively 
quickly and by a very few people. We worked at 
these problems step by step in Milwaukee and made 
a good deal of progress. 
The reindeer and orang-outang work encouraged 
me to suggest a series of groups of the fur-bearing 
