298 TAXIDERMY AND MODELLING 



group, upon which so much time and misplaced trouble had 

 been expended. 



Now all these heart-breaking difficulties and disadvantages 

 have been removed, and primarily by the skill and inventive 

 genius of a family — the talented Mintorns — whose friendship 

 and guiding assistance the writer has enjoyed and valued, and 

 hastens gratefully to acknowledge. The representatives of this 

 family, sprung from the union of a pictorial artist and an 

 equally artistic lady, were two boys and two girls, two of whom, 

 at the ages of eleven and seven respectively, gained a gold 

 medal for their flower-modelling, and were appointed Queen's 

 modellers on the occasion of Her Majesty having, at a banquet 

 given by the City of London, raised an artificial flower from 

 before her in order to inhale its perfume ! Let not the reader 

 imagine this a concocted or far-fetched incident, for it is but 

 within the last few months that the writer, although knowing 

 full well the resources of the surviving brother and sisters, was 

 yet deceived by some modelled sprays of Golden Rod {Soli- 

 dago sp.) carelessly resting in a glass vessel, and for some time 

 believed them to be stems of the natural plant. 



When, or by whom, the notion was first devised of 

 employing modelled foliage and flowers as artistic accessories 

 to taxidermic studies is not known, although the writer 

 remembers commissioning a lady to model the bilberry plant 

 for that purpose quite twenty years ago, and there are " boxes 

 of birds," as they are locally called in the " Black Country," quite 

 fifty years old, embellished with stamped leaves of the primitive 

 millinery order. In any case, all early attempts were in the 

 direction of wax and stamped leaves, and it was reserved for 

 the Mintorns to invent the beautiful and imperishable material 

 known as the " Mintorn Art Fabric," and afterwards to be the 

 introducers of this, accurately and beautifully transformed into 

 the semblance of living foliage, for museum purpbses. 



