VOL. LXXII JULY, 1922 NO. 1 Masterpieces of American Taxidermy BY WILLIAM T. HORNADAY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE GROUPS DESCRIBED HE rise of American that not more than a score of persons now living know the real story of the Society of American Taxidermists, and the revolution that it wrought. It would be utterly inadequate to write of the masterpieces of American taxidermy without setting forth at least an outline of the history that they represent. A few members of the youngest generation of workers, snugly ensconced in stone palaces of peace and plenty, have talked learnedly of the "new school" of taxidermy without mentioning the men who toiled in laying the foundations and in erecting half the walls of that "school." I am told that to-day there are taxidermists who do not like being called anything less than "sculptors." We opine that never since art was born did any branch of it, or any twig of it, ever receive so swift and forceful an upward thrust as taxidermy received in America from 1879 to 1890. From 1880 to 1885 a small group of young men spent all their savings, and also broke their backs, for the cause represented by the small but vigorous "S. A. T." They have lived to see all their dreams come true, and they have lived to contemplate with outrageous pride and satisfaction a great cycle of results in the class yclept "I-told-you-so." It cannot be said, in hackneyed phrase, that "they builded better than they knew," for with boundless complacency they believed that they were making history and laying the foundations of a real uplift. Fortunately, in that belief they were not alone, or unaided; for everybody helped! In 1879, there were in America a few very good bird taxidermists, but no amount of bush-beating could scare out even one good mammal-mounter. "animals," big and little, were "stuffed" literally-with straw, tow, cotton, sawdust, or worse. So far as we are aware, no museum maintained a whole taxidermist, save the new National, at Washington, where Edward Marshall mounted birds. Most other museums were supplied by independent workers and the work of the two or three foreign taxidermists at Ward's Natural Science Establishment at Rochester. The idea of scientific museum groups of large mammals, with natural or artificial accessories, was born in a forest reeking with live orang-utans and gibbons on the Sadong River, Borneo, in the glorious month of November, 1878. It was there that the first large mammal group ever produced in America was thought out and determined upon. A year later it took visible form in "A Fight in the Tree-Tops," mounted at Ward's, in 1879, and first exhibited (in 1880) at the Saratoga meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There it was seen by Copyrighted in 1922 in United States, Canada, and Great Britain, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed in |