Читать книгу In Brightest Africa онлайн

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The reason for this was not so much that no one knew better. It was more the fact that no one would pay for better work. Professor Ward had to set a price on his work that the museums would pay, and at that time most museums were interested almost exclusively in the collection of purely scientific data and cared little for exhibitions that would appeal to the public. They preferred collections of birds' skins to bird groups, and collections of mammal data and skeletons to mammal groups. The museums then had no taxidermists of their own.

However, many of the prominent museum men of to-day had their early training at Ward's Natural Science Establishment. Soon after I went to Ward's another nineteen-year-old boy named William Morton Wheeler, now of the Bussey Institution at Harvard, turned up there. E. N. Gueret, now in charge of the Division of Osteology in the Field Museum of Natural History, George K. Cherrie, the South American explorer; the late J. William Critchley, who became the chief taxidermist in the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences; Henry L. Ward, director of the Kent Scientific Museum in Grand Rapids; H. C. Denslow, an artist formerly associated with several of the leading museums as bird taxidermist; William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoölogical Park, and Frederick S. Webster, who was the first president of the Society of American Taxidermists, were all among the friends I made in those early days. A long list of others, not my contemporaries at that institution, but men with whom I have since been associated in museum work, might be added. Dr. Frederic A. Lucas had left Ward's shortly before my arrival to take up his duties at the Smithsonian Institution but I came to feel that I knew him very well through the stories and reminiscences of my companions. It was not until my return from my third expedition in 1911 that my delightful association with him as the director of the American Museum of Natural History was begun.