[Book Reviews]

Abstract

FEW tasks are more distressing to a right-minded naturalist than the inspection of the ordinary mounted specimens of animals in most museums in this country and elsewhere. More hideous spectacles than usually meet one's eyes when visiting these establishments it is impossible for man toform, or mind to imagine. Some little advance, it is true, has been made of late years, upon what was formerly the prevailing type of a “stuffed beast.” But no real reform can take place until the curators of museums have come to recognise the great truth, that, unless such objects are properly mounted, it is worse than useless to exhibit them to the public at all. They should be taken down and stowed away in drawers, or preserved in any other way that may be convenient for scientific study. Left in their glass cases, they are much more likely to repel than to attract the ordinary observer, for whose benefit the exhibition is intended.

Die Praxis der Naturgeschichte. Zweiter Theil: Dermoplastik und Museologie, oder das Modelliren der Thiere und das Aufstellen und Erhalten von Naturalien-sammlungen.

Unter Mitwirkung von Präparator Bauer, Prof. G. Jäger, Stadtdirektions Arzt Dr. Steudel, und der Thier- und Landschafts-Maler , Paul Meyerheim und Friedrich Specht; von Philipp Leopold Martin. 8vo, pp. 240, six plates. (Weimar: B. F. Voigt. London: Williams and Norgate 1870.)