Читать книгу In Brightest Africa онлайн

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Similarly the measurement of animals for taxidermy presents many difficulties. The size of a lion's leg, for instance, measured as it hangs limp after the animal's death is not accurate data for the leg with the muscles taut ready for action. Nor is an animal's body the same size with its lungs deflated in death as when the breath of life was in its body. All these things must be taken into account in using measurements or even casts to resurrect an animal true to its living appearance.

My work on the deer groups impressed me with the fact that taxidermy, if it was to be an art, must have skilled assistance as the other arts have. I began to dream of museums which would have artist-naturalists who would have the vision to plan groups and the skill to model them and who would be furnished with skilled assistance in the making of the manikins and accessories and in the mounting of the animals. And it seemed as if the dream were about to come true. About this time I had a conference with Dr. Herman Bumpus, then director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He told me that he had then at the museum a young man named James Clark who could model but who did not know the technique of making manikins and mounting animals. The result of our talk was that Clark came out to my shop in Chicago and together we went through the whole process, mounting a doe which now stands in the American Museum. But the old museum trouble broke out again. It cost a lot to mount animals in the method which Clark brought back. So there was pressure to reduce the cost and, under this pressure, the methods, in the words of O. Henry, "were damaged by improvements." However, in the course of time it was demonstrated that while it often happens that an honest effort to make a thing better often makes it cheaper also, an effort merely to cheapen a thing very seldom makes it better.