12 TAXIDERMY. 



Desmoulins, and above all Becoeur ; for no one 

 in France has mounted as many birds as the 

 latter. * 



It remains for us to speak of a little work pub- 

 lished by Henor and Mouton Fontenelle; they 

 had at first no other object than to read their 



* He is a nephew of Becoeur's of Metz, who invented the 

 metallic soap. Becoeur of Metz was the best apothecary in 

 that city. He mounted fresh birds in the greatest perfection, 

 and by a little practice one is sure to succeed with his method. 

 He opened his bird in the usual manner, that is to say by the 

 middle of the belly, he easily took out the body by this opening, 

 without cutting any of the extremities, he then removed the 

 flesh by the aid of a scalpel, taking the precaution to preserve 

 all the ligaments; he anointed the skin, and put the skeleton 

 in its place, carefully dispersing the feathers on each side. He 

 run the head through with an iron wire, in which he had 

 formed a little ring at nearly the third of its length ; the 

 smallest side passed into the rump, in such a manner that the 

 ring of the iron wire was under the sternum/ he then passed 

 a wire into each claw, so that the extremities of the wire 

 united to pass into the little ring ; he bent these extremities 

 within, and fixed them with a string to the iron in the middle 

 of the vertebral column. He replaced the flesh by flax or 

 chopped cotton, sewed up the bird, placed it on a foot or sup- 

 port of wood, and gave it a suitable attitude, of which he was 

 always sure, for a bird thus mounted could only bend in its 

 natural posture. He prepared quadrupeds in the same man- 

 ner. If this man, so favourably known (since he created the 

 art of Taxidermy) had not invented the arsenical soap, we 

 should not now have the pleasure of seeing in our cabinets, 

 many birds mounted by him sixty years ago, and which are 

 still in very beautiful preservation. 



