FIFTY YEARS OF MUSEUM WORK 11 



when it comes to making a temporary pedestal, putting up a shelf, 

 packing a box or doing anything not strictly in their line. The motto 

 at Ward's was viam inveniam, autfaciam: "I will either find or make a 

 way." 



Of course this is the age of specialization, but it does seem as if 

 there was too much of it, and just as some of us lament the disappearance 

 of the old-time "all-round" naturalist, so "old-timers" like Hornaday, 

 Akeley and myself grieve over the helplessness of the modern preparator, 

 his dread of working over time, his frequent inability to be on time, and 

 his readiness to make up for being late by quitting early. We worked a 

 dozen hours a day and then went home to work for ourselves or took our 

 best girl to the theatre. We heard nothing in those days of the artistic 

 temperament — we heard more of laziness or general cussedness. 



Also, in my desire to become a skilled preparator, I took advantage 

 of Professor Ward's long absences to acquaint myself with still other 

 branches of preparatory work and particularly the mounting of skeletons, 

 a matter that had a most important influence on my future. 



There were but two preparators in those early days, one an 

 osteologist by the name of Roch. When I, representing unskilled labor, 

 Was detailed to cut up a pig, skilled labor promptly quit work and while 

 the matter was adjusted temporarily, the result was, fortunately for me, 

 that later Roch literally if not metaphorically took French leave, a step 

 fraught with much more importance than appears on the face of it. 

 The place left vacant by Roch was filled a little later by a skilled and 

 genial French preparator named Bailly, a pupil of the naturalist and 

 African traveler, Jules Verreaux. 



Jules Francois Desiree Bailly was trained in the Maison Verreaux 

 and had come to Philadelphia as general preparator for the Pennsylvania 

 General Hospital. He was a skilled osteologist, and a fair general taxi- 

 dermist. Also he was an expert mounter of frogs in grotesque attitudes, 

 an art that had aroused my interest as a small boy in New York, where 

 a number of them displayed in a window on Broadway shared my atten- 

 tion with the hundred-bladed knife shown in the old Astor House. 



Bailly was a type of preparator rare in those days, in that he was 

 quite ready to impart his knowledge and skill to any one willing to 

 devote time to its acquisition, and under his supervision were trained a 

 number of deft-handed preparators whose work may be seen in almost 

 any of our larger institutions. He was willing to impart his knowledge 

 and skill to others and willing to give his own time to do this. The 

 first was a rare quality in the preparator of fifty years ago, the latter 



