450 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



winter, in watching their manners and actions in their native 

 haunts, and who knew from his own keen observation exactly 

 what were their favourite surroundings, what kind of soil or of 

 rock, or of tree or of flower each species would be most likely 

 found among or near. Most collections contained only the 

 birds themselves. Here we had not only birds, but the home in 

 which the birds dwelt, most carefully and accurately reproduced, 

 and on such a scale and in such a manner as had never been 

 done anywhere before. As for the birds themselves, not only 

 were they the finest and best specimens of their kind that could 

 be procured, and in many cases showing various stages of 

 plumage, at different ages and different seasons of the year, but 

 far more care, knowledge, and artistic skill had been expended 

 on their mounting than was generally the case either in museums 

 or in private collections. The art of taxidermy, though quite 

 an old one in Europe, extending back certainly three or four 

 hundred years, had made very little progress until very recent 

 times, and even now, though there was so great a development of 

 nearly all branches of art, it had had far too little attention 

 bestowed upon it. Very few people seemed to know the difference 

 between a really well-mounted bird or mammal and an inferior one, 

 but there was as much difference between them as between a picture 

 of a lion by Landseer or Eosa Bonheur and a picture of the same 

 animal depicted by a village artist on the sign of a public-house. 

 And yet so little did people understand this, that they went on 

 filling museums and collections with wretched examples, and 

 continued to pay the unfortunate bird-stuffer a miserably 

 inadequate sum for work which should be the work of a real 

 artist, and which could only be done by a man who not only had 

 devoted great care and attention to the subject, but had also the 

 rare gift of inborn genius. He was very critical, indeed, as 

 they could see, on the subject of bird-stuffing, and he was happy 

 to be able to say, and every time he entered that museum it 

 struck him more, that the greater number of specimens in it, 

 though, of course, they were unequal, were most admirable 

 specimens of the art of taxidermy. Many of them were very 

 fine indeed, all were above the average, and he believed there 

 was not a single bad one among them. The collection was 

 eminently adapted for public instruction. If the advantages to 

 be derived from it were only the momentary pleasure of looking 



