W. J. Holland

Section 1. Long-haired Mammals of Medium Size.—Examples: Wolves, certain dogs, large apes, baboons and monkeys; the smaller bears, hair seals, all long-haired quadrupeds from the size of the fox to the Newfoundland dog; also, all old dry skins of mammals between the two sizes mentioned.

While it will be advised in Section III. of this subject to mount short-haired skins of the above sizes upon clay-covered manikins, it is very often an impossibility to pursue this course with a dry skin, no matter what its pelage may be like. Dry skins more than one year old are usually so shrunken, hard, and inelastic, that in circumference they are one or two sizes smaller than life, and it is very often impossible to stretch them sufficiently to make them fit over a manikin of the right size. The only way in which enough power can be brought to bear upon them to force them to stretch to their proper size in neck and body, is to fill them with straw, and ram it so hard that the skin is forced to stretch. Even if you fill a shrunken body so full that it will stretch no more, if you keep it thoroughly moist, or even wet, in wet cloths, and return to the charge next day with more straw and muscle, you will find that the skin yields a good deal more, and perhaps reaches the right size without further protest. Very often this is the only treatment that will save an old, dry skin from becoming a total loss. In all such cases fill out the worst shrunken parts first, to make sure of conquering them, and leave the less difficult portions to the last.

The chief differences between the method described in the previous chapter for mounting small mammals, and that for the subjects included in this section are simply these: (1.) The larger animals require leg wires or irons that are too large to be bent at will and twisted together. (2.) Where rods are used, a thread must be cut on the lower end of each to receive a nut under the pedestal, because leg rods can not be fastened in any other way. (3.) A stout wooden bar must be used in the body for the leg, head, and tail wires, or irons, to run through, and upon which all these can be stapled down firmly. (4.) For various reasons, it is best that all these animals should be filled with straw by the old process of stuffing.

To mount a specimen belonging in this section, proceed precisely as directed in the previous chapter, with wiring and making each leg, except where the specimen is so large that it requires rods for the legs instead of wires. It is only the larger and heavier animals of this section, viz., the wolves, large dogs, large kangaroos, anthropoid apes, and the like, that require rods instead of wires. For your foxes, baboons, and small kangaroos, you can use wires of the large sizes, of about the same proportionate length as for your squirrel. In getting out the rods for the legs of your large specimens, use Norway iron, because it is toughest, and proceed as follows:

Decide upon the attitude of your specimen, then lay the bones of each leg in its intended position on the table, take a straight wire of large size (No. 9) and bend it to fit the back of the leg bones, precisely where you wish your rod to go. Leave an end about two and one-half inches long, projecting straight downward from the centre of the foot, to go through the pedestal and receive a nut underneath. Cut a thread on this lower end, and fit a hexagonal nut. For the hind legs, let the upper end of each rod project beyond the upper end of the femur for a distance equal to about two-thirds the length of that bone. The irons to support the head should be two in number, and should be long enough to reach from the end of the nose to the centre of the body. The tail iron will be regulated by circumstances.

The Hand of an Anthropoid Ape.—It nearly always happens that every skin of a large gorilla, chimpanzee, or orang utan is totally destitute of bones. Now the hand of such an animal is a very important feature. Do not attempt to make it with wires and tow alone, for if you do, the fingers will be semicircles, resembling the half of an over-brown doughnut. Each joint must show an angle, and each finger be flat on the inside. The accompanying cut (Fig. 29) shows how to make the hand of an anthropoid ape so that it shall be as natural as life. The wooden bones give the proper angles at the joints, and the tow-wrapped wire underneath gives the finger its proper breadth. When all is ready, cover each finger manikin with clay, make the palm hollow and flat, and let the end of the iron rod come out in the centre of the palm. This method gives a hand that is beyond criticism. For hand and foot studies of apes and monkeys, see "The Standard Natural History," vol. v., page 512.

The following animals, when of adult size, require leg supports of the following sizes: Large foxes, No. 8 wire; olive baboon, No. 5 or 6; small kangaroo, No. 4 to 6; wolverine, No. 6; coyote, 1/4 inch rod; setter dog, 1/4 inch; peccary, 1/4 inch; great ant-eater, 1/4 inch; gray wolf, 5/16 inch; giant kangaroo, 3/8 inch for hind legs; harp seal, 3/8 inch.

Having made the legs complete, lay the skin upon its back, with the legs spread out, make the irons or wires cross each other as shown in the accompanying figure (Plate VI.), and then hew out a piece of tough wood of the general shape and proportion as that shown in the cut. Let this be as small as practicable to avoid splitting when the irons are stapled down upon it. Round off the corners and the ends, so that you can easily work all around this wooden backbone, when filling the animal. Now lay this piece of wood in the skin, upon the crossed leg irons, mark the points at which the irons need to pass through it, and bore holes accordingly, slanting each hole through the stick, for good reasons. The next step is to pass the irons through these holes (by bending them a little, and straightening them afterward) and when all are through, adjust the legs so that there is plenty of loose skin in the body, both in length and breadth. Remember that the stick is to be in the centre of the body, not the top. When the adjustment is complete, bend the end of each iron sharply down upon the stick, and staple it down with the utmost firmness.

Next pass one of your neck irons through the skull from back to front, boring a hole at the back for the purpose, so as to make the end of the iron pass out at the nasal cavity. Replace the missing flesh of the skull with tow or excelsior, bound down with thread, cover all with clay, poison the inside of the head and neck skin with arsenical soap, insert the skull in the head, and fasten the lower end of each neck iron firmly upon the centre stick.

The tail must now be made, but it is wise to fasten the tail iron so that it can be made to slip out or in, until it is known precisely how long it shall be, and then the end may be fastened securely with staples. Now bend up the legs into position, and give the animal its attitude. Procure your pedestal, or limb of a tree, and place the animal in attitude upon it; mark where the iron supports are to pass through, bore the necessary holes, and see if the animal will stand just as you wish it to. If not, work at its legs, and bore new holes until it does; then take it off, poison the inside of the skin liberally with strong arsenical soap, and proceed to stuff it with straw, or chopped tow, or excelsior if you prefer that, but I never do. For my own use I prefer soft straw, chopped fine.

Fill the neck first, using your wooden filler, then the body. If the body threatens to be too small, fill that first. Before going far, fill out the hind-quarters properly. Work on the body all over at the same time, and do not finish one-half of the animal before you have touched the other half, for this course would get you into endless trouble.

Having filled the body full, and shaped it the best you can, and sewn it up at all points save two,—a hole between the forelegs and one under the tail,—now put it in final position on its pedestal, and fasten it there. Having done this and surveyed the scene, you will observe that the form of the animal is very faulty, and the skin not nearly full enough. Something more must be done.

Unless the specimen is a seal, or something else with short, close hair, part the hair carefully and make a long, perpendicular slit in the skin behind each foreleg and in each flank, as shown in Plate III., I-I, and K-K. Through these openings you can introduce your metal filling tools, and also filling materials ad libitum, and give the interior a complete overhauling. You can easily push your iron filler through the straw, and raise the line of the back, shoulders, or hind-quarters, and lower the line of the breast and abdomen until both are right. Then, fill with more straw, or tow, if you like now. Through these holes you command the entire body of the animal at every point, and now you must work out your own salvation. When all is finished and the body is quite full and solid, sew up the openings carefully, and unite the hair over them so that they will be hidden. If you are careless in filling, and pull out a lot of hair around each of the openings, so much the worse for you.

For full instructions in regard to work on heads, see a special chapter.

Cutting out Pieces of Skin.—It not infrequently happens that in mounting an old skin it will be found to have been unduly stretched in drying, and in spite of one's best efforts there will be too much skin in a flank, or behind a shoulder, or that the body itself will be entirely too large. In such cases, when the animal is clothed with hair which can be made to hide the seams, it is necessary and permissible to cut a long slit in the skin where the looseness occurs, and cut out a strip so that when the edges are brought together the wrinkle no longer exists. Usually such cuts are made in the shape of a triangle running out to a very fine point, so that when the incision is sewn up the entire adjacent surface will be quite smooth.

When a taxidermist has a fresh skin, or one which has been but recently prepared dry, it is very seldom that any skin-cutting is necessary. With a good elastic skin there are ways of working away from any part a superabundance of skin, or forcing the skin on parts adjacent to the wrinkles to contract sufficiently to cause their disappearance.

On close-haired animals, wrinkles must be worked away, which can in a majority of cases be accomplished by hard, persevering work with the filler. With long-haired animals which have no stripes or spots, and on which the hair can be made to hide all seams, it is best to cut out triangular strips of skin. In the latter case it saves much time and hard labor. It certainly gives a better specimen, and if such tricks leave no visible trace upon the animal, where is the harm? I care not if a skin be slit in twenty places so long as the cuts are tightly sewn up, and are invisible to the eye of the observer.

Bird skins must never be cut in this way, for to the ornithologist who diligently studies every specimen, the presence of every feather and every bare spot naturally belonging to the bird is of importance. Do not forget this caution, unless you wish to call down upon your head the just wrath of the ornithologist. Neither is it possible to do any skin-cutting upon reptiles, for there is no natural covering to hide seams, and to cut out any scales is to mutilate a specimen.

Section II. Mounting Long-haired Mammals of Large Size, for which the Manikin is unnecessary.—Examples: Musk ox, bears (except large polars and grizzlies), yak, Bactrian camel in winter coat, llamas and their allies; also old, dry shins generally, which require forcible stretching.

While the manikin process is the one par excellence for the great majority of large quadrupeds, it is also, until you get perfectly familiar with it, the longest. There are various large animals whose long, thick, and matted hair so completely hides the surface of the wearer that a shorter method of mounting can be followed with very satisfactory results. This is simply stuffing with straw in the same manner as described in detail in the previous section, with but one exception—the manner of attaching the leg irons to the central beam of the body.

The leg irons are cut and fitted to the leg bones precisely as shown in Plate VII. But the legs are made with the skin attached at the foot, the skin is drawn over, fitted and sewn up, and each leg is completely finished while the skin lies in a heap upon the table. For a large animal this takes some time, and as fast as the legs are finished each must be carefully wrapped up in ice blankets that have been wet in salt-and-alum water, and kept soft until all are done. Oil the threads on the rods, to keep them from rusting.

The next step is to procure the centre board, which should be about one-third as wide, from top to bottom as the depth of the animal's body. In the illustration showing the manikin of a tiger (Plate VII.) the body board is wider than is desirable for the same animal were the body to be filled with straw. If the board is too wide, it is impossible to get around it with the fillers, and work through the specimen from one side to the other.

To put the members of the body together, lay the skin upon the floor on its back, in the same general shape as shown in Plate VI. Put the body board in place and mark the points where the ends of the leg irons strike it. Now for the iron squares.

The old and antiquated way to fasten leg irons to a centre board consisted in leaving a long end projecting, bending it like the letter U, and stapling it to the board. That was always a poor way, and in the light of a perfect arrangement it now seems poorer than ever.

When Mr. John Martens came over from Hamburg to work as a mammal taxidermist in Professor H.A. Ward's great Natural Science Establishment, at Rochester, N.Y., the most valuable luggage he brought with him was the idea of the iron square for attaching leg irons to a centre board. For that particular purpose it would be hard to devise a more perfect arrangement, and I shall be at some pains to describe it.

It requires four irons to fasten the legs to the centre board, one for each leg, and to make a set for an animal the size of a large mountain sheep ram, proceed as follows:

Procure four pieces of flat bar iron, 1/4 of an inch thick, 1-1/4 or 1-1/2 inch wide, and 9 inches long. At a point 3-1/2 inches from one end, bend each iron at a perfect right angle, which, of course, can only be done by heating it. Now heat the short arm red hot, clamp the end of it in a vise, and make a twist of exactly a quarter of a turn in the short arm, as close up to the angle as you can. This will make the end of the short arm stand out in a horizontal plane against the side of the body board.

At the end of the short arm, with its centre exactly 3 inches from the inner face of the long arm, drill or punch a hole of the right size to receive the threaded end of the leg iron, but no larger. (For our Ovis montana ram it should be half an inch in diameter.) File off the sharp corners of this end.

At a point about 1-1/4 inch from the inner angle of the square, and in the long arm, drill a hole about 7/16 or 1/2 an inch in diameter, for a stout bolt to pass through. Between that and the end of the long arm, drill (or punch) two screw-holes, and countersink them. That is all there is to the making of the square, and the accompanying cut (Fig. 31) accurately represents it. Each pair of squares is put on with a single square-headed bolt, the length of which varies according to the thickness of the body board. For our mountain ram, the bolts should be 3/8 of an inch in diameter, and about 2-1/2 inches long.

It is useless and unnecessary for me to attempt to describe the different sizes of squares necessary for animals of various sizes, for circumstances must be the instructor in that. I will remark, however, that for a large bison or moose, where the finished specimen will weigh perhaps 600 or 700 pounds, and the strain on the irons is very considerable, I have found it necessary to make squares of flat iron 3/8 or 7/16 of an inch thick by 1-3/4 inch wide.

Caution.—Do not make, the short, or outer arm, too long. If too long, and the hole once drilled, you will hardly be able to make it shorter; but if too short, it can easily be made longer by putting a piece of board between the long arm of the square and the body board. The length of the outer arm of the squares for the hind legs is gauged by the width of the pelvis. The measurement to be taken is the distance between the centres of the two femora when both are in their natural positions in the skeleton, and with this distance once ascertained it is easy to deduct the thickness of the centre board, and calculate how long each outer arm shall be. The distance between the heads of the two humeri is practically the same as the distance between the femora.

In making the hind leg, the iron should be no longer at the upper end than the end of the femur, and once this is determined the upper end of the femur must be cut off with a saw, to give room for the squares and two nuts. The end of the iron for the front leg may project three inches or so above the head of the humerus, and be bent slightly backward; to point upward in the same direction as the scapula.

Remember that at first the squares of the two pairs are set on exactly opposite each other, by means of the single bolt for each pair. Insert the upper end of each leg iron, screw the upper nut down firmly, then lift the half-made animal and stand it on its legs. Being free to move, the legs are very shaky, and you proceed at once to put them in position. You now adjust the legs according to your original design, bore holes in the rough pedestal for the lower ends of the rods to pass through, and shift and change the different members, now here, now there, until you are satisfied that the leg's are in precisely the right attitudes. If the leg that is stepping out in front is too short, run up the two nuts at the square, and thus make the leg an inch or two longer. Those that are too long are easily shortened by shifting their nuts lower down. You have such absolute control over the legs that you can shift and change them just as much as you please, and that very easily. If the whole animal is coupled too short or too long, it is but five minutes' work to take out a bolt, bore another hole, and shift the forelegs farther forward or back. When everything is perfectly to your liking, tighten up every nut to its very tightest, and insert screws through the screw-holes that have been provided in the long arm of each square. Each leg is now a fixture.

The great beauty of this method, which appears to its greatest perfection in the construction of a manikin, lies in the fact that you have, from first to last, the most perfect control over the different parts of the entire animal. When you discover as you proceed that something is wrong, it is an easy matter to change it, provided the skin has not been put on the manikin.

In putting together an animal with the legs in the skin, you are necessarily troubled somewhat by the skin of the body, which hinders the turning of your wrench, etc.; but all such difficulties exist only to be overcome.

Put the neck irons through the skull, and fasten the inner end of each to the body board, as shown in the tiger manikin, or in any other solid way you prefer. As to the tail, ditto, and when the attitude is perfect, and all parts fastened together, then, and not until then, anoint the inside of the skin with arsenical soap, all that it will hold, and give it time to be absorbed. Put the head in position by bending the neck irons, place the feet in position, and tighten the nuts under the pedestal. Now turn the animal upside down, put a rope under each end of the pedestal, and hang the whole affair up to the ceiling, or to a beam, by means of the ropes, so that it will swing clear of the floor.

Next sew up the skin of the abdomen and breast, and proceed to fill the neck, shoulders, and hind-quarters with soft straw. Oat straw is the best, if you can get it. If you can procure no soft straw, then have a boy take your wheat straw, bunch by bunch, and with a mallet pound it upon a block to crush it and make it soft. In filling the animal, the first thing to do is to fill it out at all points, loosely at first, to get the general proportions. The skin should not touch your iron squares or the body board at any point, for if it does, something is wrong. At first you will work with your large wooden fillers, but as the straw gets packed, and the wooden tool will not go through it, take your iron fillers. No matter how hard straw may be packed, with a burrowing, twisting motion you can force that wedge-pointed instrument through the straw so as to reach any point that needs more filling out.

Be careful about the line of the back, and keep it exactly in place, along the centre of the body, and always at the highest point. Do not let the back line of a feline animal, especially a tiger or a leopard, get down upon one side, as will be sure to happen if you are not watchful. When the outline of the back is fixed, then fill out the breast and abdomen, and get the lower line of the body just as it should be. As you proceed with all this, keep sewing up the skin from time to time until only two holes remain, one at the breast and one between the hind legs well back. Now take the animal down, stand it upon the floor, cut slits in the sides, as directed in the previous section, and through them finish the filling and shaping of the body.

All this takes work, hard work, intelligent work, and a great deal of it. Make the body hard and firm, and as smooth on the outside as Nature does. To secure smoothness, and to lower the unnatural knobs that are sure to appear, beat the animal from time to time with a flat club. When all is done, fill in the last bit of straw at the various holes, sew them up strongly but neatly with stout linen twine, or "gilling thread," well waxed, and dress the fur. This will be treated elsewhere in a separate section, as also will the treatment of the head.