388 TAXIDERMY AND MODELLING 



some instances to get effects both on rock and tree models, 

 and they may either stand alone or be supplemented by oils 

 flatted as much as possible ; indeed, it does not matter how 

 the effect is produced if it be managed successfully. 



On no account let natural trunks and branches of trees 

 be introduced into cases ; they inevitably produce disaster, for 

 sooner or later beetles or other insects make their appearance, 

 and a beetle which emerges from the trees, and whose larva bores 

 the woodwork of the cases, or gets out into the museum to bore 

 into something else, is not a foe to be despised. Such an in- 

 stance has happened several times in the history of the Leicester 

 Museum. In the Bickley Collection, previously mentioned, 

 beetles made their appearance after a lapse of thirty years, and 

 in a collection of New Guinea birds, in which a natural stump was 

 very prettily though wrongly arranged, they appeared after a 

 lapse of twenty years, boring through the cases in both instances. 



Birch is a sure harbour for these beetles, and all the birch 

 furniture in the museum was destroyed by them, or their larvae, 

 as it is being destroyed elsewhere. The presence of these little- 

 recognised museum pests may be known by a fine yellowish 

 dust which drops. When they have reduced the inside to 

 powder, they escape by the minute holes — " worm-holes "^to 

 destroy something else. 



Birch bark is so easily stripped from the trees, that it 

 possesses a certain fascination in suggesting its use for covering 

 the paper cylinder instead of by the laborious method of super- 

 imposing layer upon layer of torn tissue-paper ; but its use is 

 dangerous, and unless it were steeped in the bichloride of 

 mercury preparation (Formula ii), it would be impossible to 

 answer for it, and although, no doubt, the trees and twigs which 

 hid destroyers for twenty and thirty years had not been well 

 dressed, yet the appearance of one of the stumps indicated that 

 an abundance of turpentine and paint had been used upon it. 



