36 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1921. 
the bird skin take the form which he had mentally determined to be 
the natural and best position. While at Ward’s establishment he made 
advances in the methods, but it was not until he had been in the 
National Museum for some time that he was at his best. His work 
on dry skins and dismounting and remounting old birds was per- 
fected here. ) 
Mr. Wood came to the Museum in 1888, and at first was employed 
to assist Mr. William T. Hornaday in taking care of the live animals 
in the shed adjoining the Smithsonian Building—the beginning of 
the National Zoological Park collections. After a little time he began 
to mount birds for the Chicago Exposition, and his work won the 
approval of Mr. Robert Ridgway, and when there was a vacancy in 
bird taxidermy he was placed there and continued in this work until 
his death. ; 
In years to come, as now, Mr. Wood will be known by his fine work 
displayed in the mounted bird collection on exhibition in this Museum. 
The hawks and owls, parrots, and game birds, the greater number 
remounted by him, show the quality of his work and point to the 
loss which the Museum has sustained in his death. 
William Palmer, for many years a valued member of the Museum 
force, died in New York City on April 8, 1921. He was born at 
Penge, England, August 1, 1856, and came to this country with 
his father, the late Joseph Palmer, in 1868. The elder Palmer 
became connected with the Museum in 1873 as its preparator, and 
was particularly skillful in all matters pertaining to modeling, 
casting, the coloring of reproductions, and taxidermy. William 
Palmer, under the tutelage of his father, became, in time, equally 
adept in these subjects. He joined the Museum force in 1874 as 
an assistant to his father. In 1883 he was sent to New Haven, 
Conn., to prepare the large models of the giant squid and octopus 
exhibited at the Great International Fisheries Exhibition in London, 
and later transferred here, where they, and many other examples of 
his art, still remain. With Messrs. Lucas and Scollick, of the 
Museum force, he went to Newfoundland, in the spring of 1903, and 
took part in the preparation of a mold and skeleton of a 78-foot 
sulphur-bottom whale. A year later he accompanied Dr. G. P. 
Merrill to the State of Sinaloa, Mexico, for the purpose of making a 
mold of the great Bacubarito meteorite. 
Mr. Palmer was an excellent general naturalist, and was par- 
ticularly well versed in the local fauna and flora, in which he had 
specialized for many years. He began a collection of birds in 
the spring of 1874, which in time became a very important one, 
and contained many local rarities and records, some of which are 
still unique. in the course of his ornithological work he had the 
