12 



FIFTY YEARS OF MUSEUM WORK 



an extremely rare quality today. It is not too much to say that the 

 excellent quality of skeletal preparations in our great museums is 

 directly due to the pupils trained by Bailly, and the general advance 

 in taxidermy largely the result of his liberal-mindedness. 



It is indeed a small world, and the invisible threads of our lives and 

 careers are inextricably mixed: Had I not gone to Rochester, Roch, the 

 osteologist, would not have left; had he not left, Bailly would not have 

 come to the Establishment; had he not come, there would have been no 

 one ever ready to instruct the young preparators and transmit his skill 

 to others. And so the cutting up of a small pig led to the fine anatomical 

 collection in the National Museum. And, in looking at these collections, 

 as well as those of Cambridge and Chicago, and elsewhere, it should be 

 borne in mind that their high standard of excellence should be largely 

 credited to Jules Bailly. 



But, there were other opportunities at "Ward's" than those for 

 acquiring a knowledge of preparatory work and perfecting oneself, so 

 to speak, in the mechanical side of natural history, and one of the 

 greatest of these opportunities was that of handling zoological material 

 of all kinds, particularly skeletal material. Sorting over the contents 

 of a maceration barrel comprising two or three skeletons was the best 

 possible training in comparative anatomy and a most excellent founda- 

 tion for work in paleontology, which, through force of circumstances, 

 fell to me later. I tried reading various text-books on zoology but soon 

 grew tired of it as there seemed to be no direct relation between them and 

 the work in hand. So it has come to pass that I have never read through 

 any scientific text-book, never attended a course of scientific lectures, 

 never done an hour's laboratory work nor made a single microscope 

 slide. And up to the time I went to Washington, I had little knowledge 

 of the principles of classification as applied to any group of animals, not 

 even birds. I did have an excellent practical acquaintance with bones. 



An order from the Museum of Comparative Zoology for Mammals 

 and Birds, illustrating the fauna of the great zoological regions of the 

 world, afforded an unusual chance to get acquainted with these groups of 

 vertebrates, and in the course of this work, I had the pleasure of making 

 the acquaintance of Doctor J. A. Allen-then a young man, now but 

 recently passed away, and a little later, through his aid, I published mv 

 first scientific paper, on the species of Bornean orangs. 



Our museums have an enviable reputation for the manner in which 

 they hold the mirror up to Nature, and yet I feel that the Establishment 

 may justly claim a large share of the credit for this. 



