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Fourth, he must know the technique of manikin making, the tanning of skins, and the making of accessories such as artificial leaves, branches, etc.

With all these different kinds of technique in taxidermy it is obvious that if a man attempts to do practically everything himself, as I did in the deer groups, taxidermy must be a very slow process—just as if a painter had to learn to make his own paint or a sculptor to cast his own bronzes or chisel his concepts out of granite or marble.

The proper care of the skins in the field is itself a subject of infinite ramifications. I remember, for instance, my experience in skinning the first elephant that I killed. I shot him in the early afternoon. I immediately set to work photographing and measuring him. That took about an hour, and then I set to the serious work of getting off his skin. I worked as rapidly as I could, wherever possible using the help of the fifty boys of my safari, and by strenuous efforts finished taking the skin off and salting it by breakfast time the next morning. And that was not quick enough. Before I got all the skin off the carcass some of it on the under side had begun to decompose and I lost a little of it. This was a particularly difficult beast to skin because he had fallen in a little hollow and after skinning the exposed side of him all the efforts of the fifty black boys to roll him over, out of the depression, so that we could easily get at the other side, failed. After I had had more practice, I was able to photograph, measure, and skin an elephant and have his hide salted in eight hours. But then the work on the skin was only begun. A green skin like this weighs a ton and a quarter and in places is as much as two and a half inches thick. There is about four days' work in thinning it. I have had thirty or forty black boys for days cutting at the inside of the skin in this thinning process or sharpening the knives with which they did the work.