370 
The time came when he was desirous of selling 
the collection. Immediately a movement was 
begun in Denver to purchase it and make it the 
nucleus of a great museum. The project was 
received with favor by the people. About twenty- 
eight prominent men, numbering among them the 
Colorado millionaries, subscribed $1,000 each, 
and the city of Denver duplicated the total amount. 
Other subscriptions have been secured from time 
to time. 
The association has spent from $125,000 to 
$140,000 on the museum. Following the purchase 
of the Carter collection, men were sent out to 
secure other specimens. At the present time a 
number are in the employ of the museum, traveling 
the West in search for material. 
The work of equipping a museum is expensive 
as well as difficult and tedious. Expeditions must 
be sent out, and the members must be supplied 
with everything that is necessary. Wagons must 
be secured, guides obtained, provisions and camp 
equipment provided, and every precaution made 
for a long and difficult trip. 
The specimen found and secured, an artist must 
- be sent to sketch in detail the surroundings. An 
accessory man then appears and he procures the 
eggs, if it is at the nest; the young, if there are 
any, or anything that may be in the pictures. The 
man who secures the specimen takes every possible 
measurement, skins it as only an expert museum 
man can, and prepares the hide and skeleton for 
their journey home. 
Arrived there the taxidermist sets up the 
skeleton and after a long and delicate process 
shapes a perfectly formed animal out of papier 
maché. The skeleton is taken out and. later set 
up separately. The skin of the animal is thor- 
oughly soaked, and is then sewed on the form. 
An expert taxidermist takes into account every 
muscle that shows inthe perfect animal and every 
line or feature. It is the process of completing a 
perfect animal that is known to so few taxidermists. 
The pliability of the skin after soaking allows it 
to stretch at every point, and the results of, many 
attempts may appear absurd to the naturalist. 
The Colorado Museum of Natural History will 
have perfectly mounted specimens. Experts who 
have visited the building from London and New 
York declare that there is no work in the world 
to equal that already done here. The museums 
of the largest cities have stopped mounting mam- 
mals because they cannot find a man who thor- 
oughly understands the work. Denver is unique 
in this respect. —The mounting has been done by 
Rudolph Borcherdt, an expert employed contin- 
uously by the museum. 
The local museum contains the two finest speci- 
mens of buffalo that have ever been mounted. 
They are enormous bulls, perfectly mounted, and 
each one is valued at $10,000. The case of ten 
mountain goats is the best of its kind in the world. 
There are very few ivory-billed woodpeckers, and 
the blue bird of paradise is the only one in any 
museum. The cases of antelope, wild turkey, 
pheasants and the musk ox are unsurpassed. 
Three of the finest of the Mexican variety of our 
mountain sheep were sent from Old Mexico by 
RECREATION 
Dall DeWeese, the famous hunter. He also sent 
two Pacific black-tailed deer and a magnificent 
pair of moose horns from Alaska. 
It is the object of the association to gather a 
great collection of Indian relics as well as geo- 
logical material, and place them in the museum. 
The upper floor of the large building will be de- 
voted to paintings. 
No museum in the world has the site that 
nature and the city of Denver have given the 
Colorado institution. Its windows open on a 
magnificent view of the mountain range, while the 
shining buildings of the city are in the foreground. 

Duck-Shooting at Havemeyer Point 
The technical side of sport on Great South 
Bay, Long Island, has already been fully pre- 
sented in RECREATION (January, 1906). An 
addendum of a philosophical nature may not be 
out of place, for moralizing and sport have ever 
been associated, as witness Walton’s ‘Compleat 
Angler,” and Turgenieff’s ‘‘ Annals of a Sports- 
man”’—a book which marks the beginning of 
the present social unrest in Russia. 
Havemeyer Point, the eastern end of Oak 
Beach, on Fire Island Inlet, is the most noted 
ducking region in the vicinity of New York City. 
Its network of creeks and lagoons forms an 
inviting haunt of black ducks and brant. Dur- 
ing the open season the baymen of the Point 
(reached by sailboat from Babylon) take out 
ducking parties in their batteries, or build blinds 
for point shooting in the numerous natural 
ambushes where the sand dunes of old ocean 
fronts still stand as dry islets among the salt 
marshes. 
So thick are the ducks in season that the bay- 
men of the Point are quite indifferent whether 
ducking parties come or not—for they can shoot 
ducks for sale in the New York markets with 
equal profit to that which accrues from acting 
as guides. Yet, after all, the pleasure of the 
sportsmen is secured rather than endangered by 
this independence of the baymen. For suppose 
Havemeyer Point were in fact what it is in 
name—the exclusive property of one of the rich 
sugar kings, instead of being what it is, town 
land over which every local bayman and every 
sportsman guided by a local bayman has the 
right to shoot—what would be the chance for 
Captains Gus and George and Jim to earn a 
livelihood out of ducking in any form, and 
where would the sport of the gentlemen outside 
of Mr. Havemeyer’s circle of friends come in? 
“Wages are fixed by the product of free 
land” is a universal economic law, even where 
the land is marsh land and the product wild 
ducks. So long, therefore, as the village fathers 
of Babylon wisely continue to refuse the tempt- 
ing offers of shooting clubs for the fee of 
Segaunus Thatch, the famous sniping grounds 

