x Preface. 



attitudes* the many animals and birds which he had collected 

 was known to but few : indeed, I may say that none but those 

 who have seen them can realize the incomparable specimens, 

 amounting to some thousands in number, which this prince of 

 naturalists had collected and prepared during the many years 

 of his wanderings in the wilds of Demerara and other foreign 

 countries. During a glorious week which I spent at Walton 

 Hall in 1857, Mr. Waterton took infinite pains to teach me the 

 process he invented and practised; but though I paid every 

 attention to the instructions of my master, and made many an 

 attempt in that direction on my return home, I was obliged to 

 own that it required not only the intimate anatomical know- 

 ledge and the unwearied patience, but also the delicacy of touch 

 and the deftness of finger of a Waterton, where my more clumsy 

 hands utterly and shamefully failed. 



To descend to more modern times, I would first express my 

 acknowledgments to the Rev. A. P. Morres, Vicar of Britford, 

 near Salisbury, for the admirable papers 'On the Occurrence of 

 some of the Karer Species of Birds in the Neighbourhood of 

 Salisbury,' which with much earnest solicitation I prevailed on 

 him to write, and which I had the pleasure of printing in the 



* My first acquaintance with a specimen of Mr. Waterton's skill in bird- 

 stuffing was as follows : For some reason which I now forget, he declined to 

 send specimens, as he had been invited to do, to the first Great Exhibition, 

 in 1851, and when I ventured to express the extreme regret with which I 

 and others learnt his decision, he said he would send a few samples to the 

 College of Surgeons to the care of Professor Owen, and bade me go there 

 and see them. I did not find Professor Owen at home, but Mrs. Owen, 

 kindly offering to show me the specimens, took me into the library, and bade 

 me beware of the beak of a fine Eagle Owl, which was sitting on a perch, 

 just inside the door ; and it was not till I had examined it on all sides for a 

 considerable time that I could convince myself that- the bird was not alive, 

 but merely a skin prepared by Mr. Waterton literally a skin and feathers 

 only ; for when Mrs. Owen lifted off the head, as one might lift off the top 

 of a cardboard box, there was neither wool nor tow nor stuffing of any kind, 

 neither bone nor cork nor wire, but simply a hollow skin, which had been 

 manipulated by so masterly a hand, and by so knowing an anatomist, that 

 the dried skin showed the exact hollows and swellings, here a depression, and 

 there an excrescence, which the muscles and the sinews of the bird when in 

 life would have caused. 



