Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
In addition, this page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Taxidermy
the name given to the art of putting up natural history specimens in the dried state. It includes the skinning and stuffing of fishes, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals; insects and other invertebrata. But it does not properly comprise the making of wet zoological preparations which are to be preserved in spirits; nor, strictly speaking, does it include the articulating of skeletons, though this is usually treated of in books on taxidermy.
For the skinning of animals a few tools, such as scalpels, scissors, and forceps, are required. Incisions must be made in certain directions. Care has to be taken not to stretch the skin in detaching it from the body, and it is necessary to avoid soiling the plumage of birds or the hair and fur of mammals with blood or grease. The skull and certain wing and leg bones are left in their place to preserve as perfectly as possible the form of these parts in case of the skin being afterward mounted. Arsenical soap is largely used for preserving skin. To preserve bird skins some prefer powdered white arsenic (arsenious acid) either alone or mixed with powdered alum. But sometimes powdered oak bark and a little camphor are added, the proportions being arsenic 1 part, alum, 1 part, bark 2 parts, camphor 1½ part. These dry powders should be well rubbed, and the soapy mixtures carefully brushed into the wet surface of skins. For cleaning feathers, and especially those that are light colored, powdered plaster of Paris is very effective. Wherever bird skins or the fur-covered skins of mammals are kept, camphor or naphthaline should be present. Benzene is also very useful. Butterflies, moths, and other insects require to be kept in drawers or boxes of a peculiar construction to prevent the escape of the vapor of camphor or other preservative.
Before the taxidermist can stuff or mount well he requires some training in anatomy and modeling, and a knowledge well as some acquaintance with their of the external forms of animals, as habits.