ARSENICAL SOAPS AND POWDERS 67 



treatment with some rapidly drying preservative, more LIGHT, 

 and looking over the specimens now and then. 



For the preservation of mammals, arsenical paste is quite 

 useless, causing the hair to " sweat " from the skin, and not 

 allowing the operator to stretch it without injury when model- 

 ling ; added to which, it is quite impossible to thoroughly 

 relax such a skin by soaking in water, which is the sine qud -non 

 of a first-class preservative. To sum up, arsenic is only a drier 

 of' tissue — a quality shared by many other things, — and merely 

 sun-dried and earth-cured skins are often better preserved than 

 many " cured " by the most elaborate arsenical soaps. Indeed, 

 the writer possesses at the present moment a raven's head — a 

 trophy of correct rifle-shooting — which was, after skinning, 

 merely rubbed in with chalk and dried in a foreign sun, and 

 which is now, after an interval of thirty years, quite firm and 

 untouched by insects, although it has never been under glass. 



Let a few additional facts be noted. Since 1884 the whole 

 of the zoological collections in the Leicester Museum have been 

 remodelled, and, in taking down the old specimens and dusting 

 them out, the men were constantly affected with feverish colds, 

 sore throats, and other symptoms of arsenical poisoning, and 

 much milk was drunk by the doctor's orders. Some hundreds 

 of birds — old specimens undoubtedly " cured " with arsenic — 

 were badly " moth-eaten " ^ and infested with larvae. All 

 the groups executed by various London and provincial taxi- 

 dermists, and certainly " cured " by some arsenical preparation, 

 were burned because infested with larvae both of moth and 

 beetle ; and quite lately a bird of paradise under a glass shade, 

 executed ten years ago by a man who presumably used arsenic, 

 was eaten up ! 



' For the benefit of the unlearned in such matters, it may be stated that the moths 

 themselves do not feed upon fur or feathers ; it is their larvae (grubs) which do but 

 still, on the principle of "no moth no larvs," it is the proper thing to kill all small 

 moths flitting about a house or museum. 



