COLOmiNG AND RESTORATION OF DRIED SKIN. 211 



colour, and become quite undistinguisliable from each other. 

 But there is no excuse now-a-days for allowing the bare skin to 

 become shrivelled. The colours we cannot preserve, the form 

 we can and ought to reproduce. No one would conceive, after 

 inspecting a dried specimen, how round, full, and pouting were 

 once those black and wrinkled mandibles, and how delicately 

 they had been coloured while the animal retained life. Their 

 natural hue is rather curious, the outer surface of the upper 

 mandible being very dark grey, spotted profusely with black, 

 and its lower surface pale flesh-colour. In the lower mandible 

 the inner surface is flesh-coloured, and the outer surface pinky 

 white, sometimes nearly pure white." 



All this could easily be avoided by the taxidermist first 

 skinning the beak and lips to their farthest extent, and then 

 filling them with clay or composition, and afterwards waxing 

 and colouring the parts in question. 



Small birds having black feet or bills, which permanently 

 retain their colour, need only to have them slightly brushed with 

 oil, before casing up, to give them proper freshness. 



Hollow Eyes. — I have for a great number of years discarded 

 the conventional glass eyes* — glass buttons I have heard them 

 irreverently termed ! — for all fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, 

 excepting the smallest, using, in their stead, hollow half -globes 

 rather more oval than round; these are hand-painted on the 

 inside with either water or oil-colours, and when dry are 

 varnished, filled in with wadding and putty, or modelling-wax, 

 not clay, and fixed in the orbits with wax, see ante. These, pro- 

 perly coloured, and, in the instance of fishes, gilded inside, are 

 wonderful representations of the natural eye, and when properly 

 inserted, the cornea in mammals reproduced by wax, and the 

 eyelids properly managed, give a most life-like and natural 

 appearance to any specimen. 



"Piece Moulds " and Modelling Tongues, Muscles, &c., 

 IN Composition. — As I stated at the end of Chapter YII., 

 " composition " has for its base one of three things — clay, 



* Glass eyes have of late been much improved in shape and colour by the Germans, and 

 also by some English eyemakers, ■who have had the sense to listen to the suggestions of artistic 

 taxidermists. I have" by me now a really beautiful pair of glass lynx eyes, veined and 

 streaked, and '•cornered" in porcelain, in almost as perfect a manner as could be 

 managed .by hand-painting. 



