90 
SOC. OF AM. TAXIDERMISTS, ANXEAL REPORT. 
and a few others, whose colors are dull, need only a coat of var- 
nish, greatly thinned with turpentine, to render them fresh 
looking. It is, of course, understood that you have thoroughly 
washed the specimen. But all turtles marked with bright colors 
will need to be painted, and this must be done with thin color, 
often stippled over to avoid a streaked appearance. Large cracks 
and broken scales can be repaired with papier mache ; small 
ones — such as seams, &c. — with colored wax. White wax can be 
colored by melting it and stirring' in a little tube-color ; use hot. 
Of course particular cases will often require particular modes of 
treatment ; but once the general principles are thoroughly mas- 
tered these can be readily met. 
STRUGGLES OF AN AMATEUR TAXIDERMIST. 
BY PEOB. J. W. P. JENKS. 
Almost unconsciously to myself, I found, while enjoying a 
very brief course of lectures in natural history in my junior ^mar 
in college in 1837, a hitherto unrecognized taste developing itself 
in my mental composition. Located a year later in a frontier 
vdllage of mostly log cabins in the recent Lower Creek Indian 
Reservations of southwest Georgia as a teacher in a log school- 
house, from the shutters of which I not unfrequently observed 
wild deer and turkeys feeding in tlie pine stretches surrounding, 
my incipient taste for the study of animate nature began to 
clamor for gratification ; and with no knowledge whatever of 
taxidermy, beyond the sight of a few stuffed specimens in Peale’s 
Museum in New York, and with no written or oral instruction, 
I commenced skinning birds according to my own fancy, and, by 
means of arsenic only, preserving the skins, till I had accumu- 
lated some fifty specimens, more or less. My methods of skin- 
ning were original, and later knowledge of taxidermical modus 
operandi ctonvinces me that my specimens could never have been 
mounted, so that my first grief at losing all my specimens by the 
sinking of the stage in the Ocmulgee during a freshet, while I 
was in transit for the North, was subsequently greatly assuaged. 
Crude as they were, however, they served me for illustration in 
