THE ^"A.X.XjBIT ISTA.TXJ^.A.XjIST'. 88 
Ward's Natural Science Establishment 
in Rochester, N. Y« 
[By numerous requests from some of the 
readers of the Valley Naturalist, for an 
accurate description of Prof. Ward's Nat- 
ural Science Museum. We reprint the fol- 
lowing from the New York Evangelist.'] 
This unique scientific institution has long 
been celebrated for the excellence of its work 
and the variety and extent of its collection. 
And yet no one visits it for the first time 
without astonishment, and acknowledging 
that it altogether surpassed his highest anti- 
cipations. A few weeks ago some twenty of 
the city pastors, by invitation of Professor 
Ward, visited it in a body and were both 
surprised and delighted with what their ex- 
plorations brought to view, and the lucid ex- 
planations and statements of the Professor. 
There was no time for the most hasty glance 
at the Museum of the University, which he 
collected and arranged, and which is one of 
the best in the country. The two large end- 
rooms in the University building, upon the 
same floor with the Museum, are filled with 
all manners of animals, whose home is on the 
land, or in the water, or in the air, and their 
skeletons — the property of Mr. Ward; here 
stored provisionally, and constantly drawn 
upon to fill orders, and replenished by newly 
finished specimens. 
An hour was very pleasantly and profitably 
spent in viewing these, and listening to the 
Professor's comments, w 7 hich imparted no 
small amount of curious information, and 
happily blended the scientific with the anec- 
dotal. Thence we crossed College avenue, 
and through the main entrance to Mr. Ward's 
own grounds. We passed under an arch 
made by the enormous jaw of a right whale 
of sufficient size to admit a load of hay 
through it. Here are ten large two-story 
buildings, besides sheds and yards, devoted 
to receiving, preparing, and shipping speci- 
mens. Scarcely a day passes that does not 
bring a consignment to the establishment 
from some part of the world. Two elephants 
and two tigars, beside other animals, had 
just arrived from one of his agents and hunt- 
ers in India. Eighteen men are constantly 
employed as taxidermists, osteologists, 
moulders, and mineralogists. Several of 
these are foreigners, who worked for years 
under the most eminent anatomists abroad. 
The work turned out by the establishment 
is unsurpassed in correctness, durability, 
and finish by any similar house the world 
over. Prof. A. Agassiz, Director of the Mus- 
eum of Zoology at Cambridge, recently said 
to Prof. A. Guyot of Princeton, that after 
having tried many foreign preparatory, he 
had found the skeletons mounted by Mr. 
Ward far superior and trustworthy to any 
others, and that he had sometimes to send 
those received from abroad to him, to be 
properly remounted. 
Our stroll through the buildings was al- 
most a constant series of surprises, as it can- 
not fail to be of peculiar interest to any ad- 
mirer of nature or lover of the curious. 
"Cosmos Hall" is a large building, furnished 
in both stories with drawers and glazed cases 
which are filled with beautiful crystals, 
spars, ores and other fine minerals, with 
rocks in many thousand specimens of uni- 
form size, from localities reaching quite 
around the world. Here, too, are fossils 
alike from all lands, and showing all forms, 
from crawling bug-like Trilobites to the 
great Dinornis, or fossil bird of New Zea- 
land, with leg-bones larger than are those of 
an ox. Another building, with a hall thirty 
by forty feet, and thirty feet from floor to 
ceiling, is used at present as a general store- 
room of large objects. Here we saw the 
skin of the tiger just received from India, 
from one of Mr. Ward's hunters, which 
showed where the small rifleball had entered 
the eye, together with the skins and bones 
of three elephants also shot by him. In the 
centre of this building stands the Great Sib- 
erian Mammoth, the largest and stateliest of 
animals of modern times, being sixteen feet 
high and twenty-six feet in length. This is 
a copy made in two years of assiduous work 
by a German artist-naturalist in Stuttgart, 
Wirtenberg. Mr. Ward saw it there, and to 
the regret of its citizens generally, pur- 
chased, took it to pieces and shipped it 
across the sea to Rochester. 
Three buildings (one of them eighty feet 
long) are given to the manufacture and dis- 
play of casts of celebrated fossils, an enter- 
prise originated by Mr. Ward, and which has 
elicited the highest commendation and en- 
couragement from the scientific world. Fos- 
sil animals — the most famous in the history 
of the science, and of especial interest in 
their structure, whose remains consist only 
of some unique specimen stored in one of the 
Royal Museums of the Old Word, and thus 
inaccessible to nineteen-twentieths of geolo- 
gical students — are here reproduced in plas- 
ter, exact copies, in form and color, of the 
original. Thus the treasures of the British 
Museum, the Jardin des Plantes, Vienna, St. 
Petersburg, Madrid, &c, are reproduced in 
the cabinets sent out from here to our edu- 
cational institutions; and American schol- 
ars have equal advantages with the most 
favored of those abroad, to become ac- 
quainted with these strange types of extinct 
life. Mr. Ward spent some years, and 
many thousands of dollars, in copying these 
rare and valuable specimens in the museums 
that contain them. In his efforts he encoun- 
tered difficulties that would have discour- 
aged most men, and that required no ordin- 
ary amount of perseverance and tact to over- 
come. His collection offers many hundred 
of these copies of " gorgons, hydras, and 
chimeras dire." 
Here we enter a building devoted to "tax- 
idermy." A number of men are stuffing the 
skins of monkeys, goats, seals, turtles, beau- 
tiful birds, fishes, serpents, &c. Thousands 
of skins are stored in a room above, awaiting 
this mounting process. Indeed it is a regu- 
lar Noah's Ark, with its multitudinous ani- 
mals of every kind and species, which walk, 
fly, swim or crawl, from the tropics to the 
poles. All these skins have been subjected 
to an arsenic bath, by which they are effect- 
ually secured against the ravages of moths 
and the invasion of vermin. 
Now we come to the building devoted to 
Osteology. In the lower apartments, work- 
men — French, Belgian, German and English 
— are busy preparing the individual bones of 
the different animals, wiring them together, 
and mounting them on handsome walnut pe- 
destals, as perfect skeletons. The two upper 
stories of this building are a wonder to be- 
hold, with their bags and bundles, and 
drawers and shelves, of snow white bones, 
each lot tied up together, to be taken below 
in its turn, and mounted as a skeleton. These 
bones have come from an adjacent long shed 
where they have soaked from six to twenty- 
four months in tanks and vats of water, a:nd 
then were bleached on lattice-work trays 
made for the purpose. In this store-room 
of bones there was pointed out to us all that 
remained of Gen. Lee's famous horse "Trav- 
eller," which he rode through the war. The 
bones had been put to soak for a long time in 
the waters of a spring in Virginia, which 
proved to be impregnated with iron; so that 
they were ineffaceably stained, which makes 
it uncertain whether the skeleton will ever 
be mounted. The skeleton of the horse 
Sherman rode on his fierce raid " from At- 
lanta to the sea," was mounted here for the 
University of Wisconsin, and is now in their 
Museum at Madison. Princeton College and 
Eaiiham College, Ohio, have each lately sent 
an elephant skeleton to be mounted here. 
The Smithsonian Institute at Washington, 
Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology 
at Cambridge, Yale College, and many other 
museums, have skeletons here waiting to be 
prepared. A large lot has lately been 
shipped to Dr. Murray, the Director of the 
Government Schools in Japan. 
Passing the blacksmith's and carpenter's 
shops, we go to the Invertebrate house, 
where, above and below, are glazed cases 
and drawers filled with beautiful coral and 
lovely shells, and star fishes, sea-eggs, crus- 
taceans, sponges, gorgonia and other curious 
forms from the great sea's depths. A final 
hall contains collections of ethnological and 
archasologieal interest — implements and wea- 
pons of the "Stone age" of America, France, 
Ireland, Denmark, etc.; mummies, idols, 
etc., from Egypt; various objects fished up 
from the old "lake dwellings" of Lake 
Geneva; Peruvian and "mound building" 
pottery; ludian skulls of many races; abor- 
iginal clothing, ornaments, etc., leaving 
everything more than half unnoticed. 
The reader could not possibly form a more 
erroneous opinion than to regard this estab - 
lishment as simply a vast curiosity shop — 
a promiscuous collection of all manner of 
strange natural objects. On the contrary, it 
is an invaluable educational institution, con- 
ducted exclusively in the interest of science. 
Prof. Ward has been an enthusiast in this 
study all his life. He had a special prepara- 
tion for the work in which he is now en- 
gaged, by spending five years as a student in 
Paris, Germany and London, hearing lec- 
tures of the most noted naturalists, and 
studying assiduously the collections of the 
most celebrated museums, both royal and 
private. He supported himself while a 
student by visiting mines, quarries, and sea- 
side cliffs, and making large collections of 
minerals, rocks and fossils. In this way he 
accumulated the extensive Museum of 
Mineralogy and Geology, now filling ten 
large rooms— the property of the University 
