348 
Forest and Stream 
The fresh fish (mackerel) and a mold ready to be cast 
The cast of the body of a flounder with the fins ready to be 
set, and a sunfish with the fins and eyes in place 
MOUNTING FISH TRUE TO LIFE 
AN EXPERIMENT IN THE LIFE-LIKE REPRODUCTION OF SPECIMENS IS 
SUCCESSFULLY WORKED OUT BY THE FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY 
By ALFRED C. WEED 
r*l^HE preparation of fish specimens 
I for wall decorations or for exhi- 
I bition in our museums is one of 
the most difficult problems in taxi- 
dermy. Birds and mammals are fairly 
easy because their feathers or hair keep 
the original color and we need only to 
trouble ourselves with a reproduction of 
the form of our subject. Very little of 
the natural color of a fish can be kept 
in the skin, either dried or preserved in 
a liquid. 
There are many ways of keeping the 
fish we catch. Some draw an outline of 
the prize bass on the wall of the shack 
and fill it in with black paint. Others 
draw the outline and stretch the skin 
and fins of the fish on it. If we only 
want trophies this is probably as good 
a way as any. The record of the fish 
will remain long after other trophies 
have crowded this one from our memory. 
It is when we try to get away from 
the flat outline that we begin to get into 
trouble. The shape of the fish looks easy 
to reproduce; just get the outline and 
round out evenly from that. This can 
be done by stuffing the skin full of some- 
thing to keep it in shape until it dries. 
Many taxidermists use chopped tow and 
achieve a result that looks like an irreg- 
ular sausage. A few can get good out- 
lines with this method. The finer con- 
tours are lost because it is not possible 
to reproduce the hollows, and there is 
no way to hold the skin back in them 
if they could be reproduced. 
Another way which sometimes gives 
good results is to fill the skin with sand 
until it has dried enough to hold its 
shape. Then pour out the sand, cut a 
hole in the side that goes against the 
background, and put in a plaster or pulp 
support to keep the skin from sagging 
when the weather is damp. Field Mu- 
seum has some fine specimens mounted 
by this method. This also gives good 
outlines, but usually spoils the contours 
which make the difference between a 
good mount and a fish which looks 
“stuffed.” 
Mr. L. L. Pray, of the taxidermy staff 
of Field Museum, has Feen studying 
this subject for several years and has 
had considerable success. For the past 
several months he has been working un- 
der the present author’s direction, pre- 
paring specimens which are now, or soon 
will be, placed on exhibition. He has 
worked out two methods which, under 
his hands, produce very creditable re- 
sults. 
A small-mouth black bass or a yellow 
perch has hard, strong scales which are 
firmly fixed in the skin. If reasonable 
care is used in skinning the animal it is 
possible to fix the skin over the manikin 
made from a plaster cast in such a way 
as to give a really lifelike look and with 
little danger of having the scales curl. 
A bass and some shovelnose sturgeon 
which will soon be placed in the exhibi- 
tion series are good examples of this 
method. 
The uncertainty of mounted skins and 
the fact that such a mount is finally only 
a place to spread some color, if we are 
to give any idea of the appearance of 
the fish, has led many to try to get away 
from the fish altogether. This has been 
done by casting in wax, glue, plaster, 
etc. Most museums have shown more 
or less horrible examples of one method 
or another! • The worst fault has been 
that a plaster cast of a fin must be made 
so thick that it does not look much like 
a fin. Indeed, the ordinary plaster cast 
as exhibited in our museums is a very 
poor caricature of a fish, and it requires 
some courage to suggest exhibiting casts 
of fishes. 
Despairing of being able to make a 
satisfactory showing with mounted skins 
or with models or casts, some have tried i 
to make the specimens more pleasing to 
look at when displayed in a liquid pre- , 
servative. The round bottle which is 
best for keeping the study specimen is 
not good for display. When we get away 
from the round bottle in order to look 
through a flat glass we have trouble 
keeping the liquid from evaporating. 
These are serious defects which must be 
considered in addition to the difficulty of 
finding permanent paints which do not 
dissolve in the liquid we use for keeping 
the specimens. If all these questions are 
answered to our satisfaction, and we find 
some way of holding our fish in a life- 
like position in the liquid, we may be able 
to make fairly good exhibits. At its best 
this is a slow, troublesome process and 
hardly ever gives results to repay the 
effort. 
F had been milling around over this 
YV question for some days last winter 
when Mr. Pray suggested that he would 
like to try a scheme which he had been 
keeping in his mind for several }’ears. 
This idea was to preserve the natural 
fins in some way and then fasten them 
to a plaster cast of the body of the fish. 
If he could get a reasonably good cast 
of the body and could fasten the fins 
securely he might get something which i 
would be better than a fish skin as a \ 
place to apply his colors and which 
would surely show the body contours il 
better than could be done in most cases I 
by any way of mounting the skin. It 
would have the further advantage of ! 
requiring a small amount of time for 
each specimen, and time was a thing 
we needed more than anything else just i 
then, for we were in the midst of the 
trials of installing a big exhibit in a new 
building. 
