23° TAXIDERMY AND MODELLING 



posterity as "just over twenty, old chappie, but he was so 

 beastly old and half starved, that he should have weighed quite 

 five-and-twenty." 



Is it possible that considerations of such a nature can 

 militate against the possession of a faithful reproduction of 

 such a finny trophy ? Quite impossible ! but an instance has 

 occurred in which a pike of some considerable weight was cast, 

 and showed the perfectly natural depression of the stomach. 

 An angler, who saw it then, remarked that " he didn't seem 

 very well fed " ; so the operator rammed some artificial " food " 

 into the stomach of the fish and made another cast. When 

 the two moulds were modelled from, the "improved" fish 

 looked most unnatural, but that one was the fisherman's 

 fancy ! 



Be this as it may, most persons of sound judgment 

 prefer a thing as nearly correct as may be, and the casting 

 of a fish taken as soon as possible after capture is the only 

 method which gives anything like satisfactory results. The 

 late Frank Buckland, whose geniality was only equalled by his 

 enthusiasm for fish-casting,^ made many fine models, as his 

 fish-museum testifies ; these are, however, all cast in plaster of 

 Paris, and some few — but very few — museums have followed 

 his lead, and those chiefly in America, where, judging from 

 the excellent photographs published by Dr. Shufeldt for the 

 Smithsonian Museum,^ they appear lately to have attained to 

 some proficiency in this art ; but plaster models, from their 

 weight, brittleness, and other bad qualities fully considered 

 later on, have been discarded for many years in the Leicester 

 Museum, and have been replaced by paper, paper pulp, and 

 other compositions, all described in the following pages. 



' Life of Frank Buckland, by George C. Bompas; and Curiosities of Natural 

 History, by Francis T. Buckland. 



^ See Plates XX. -XXVI., Scientific Taxidermy for Museums. 



