Akeley as a Taxidermist: A Chapter in the History of Museum Methods

By Frederic A. Lucas
From Natural History v. 27, n. 2
(March/April, 1927): 142–152

It has fallen to me to write of Akeley as a taxidermist, and while the result is by no means satisfactory to me, I have at least recorded some of the more important contributions he made to methods of museum display: I can only plead that I have written as Providence endowed me and not as I should have liked to have done.

While Akeley was successful as a hunter, an inventor, and a sculptor, yet it is as a taxidermist that he will be best known and remembered. Taxidermy was Akeley's chosen field: from first to last, from the beginning of his career to its end, he devoted himself to improving taxidermy in every branch, artistic, mechanical, scientific; above all he strove to make its results permanent. If, as we have been told, genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, Akeley was most emphatically a genius in his taxidermy: every step from field to museum; skinning, shipping, tanning, modeling, constructing the manikin, and clothing it with skin; making the foliage, building the cases, providing them with light and ventilation, each and all bear the impress of the mind and hand of Akeley.

To repeat the words of Mr. Ward, he did more for taxidermy than any other one rnan, and but for him, museum exhibits would not be what they are today.

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In spite of the thousands of words, many of them obsolete and many practically useless, recorded in our ponderous dictionaries, there are some that seem still to be needed, among them one to define the modern taxidermist and another for what for want of a better word we call a manikin, though here, perhaps, the need is for a more gracious term for the graceful girls and stately dames who condescend to show us how garments of various descriptions should be worn. But, as I have written elsewhere, if he who delves among books in dead and living languages to decide which of the numerous, many-syllabled names some small creature is rightly entitled to bear, does not object to being called a taxonomist, he who toils over the skins of creatures great and small to make them live again, should not object to the rightful name of taxidermist. Some have styled themselves animal sculptors, but this does not distinguish the taxidermist from the artist whose work is translated into lasting stone or enduring bronze. Animator might be suggested for one who puts life into such a hopeless looking object as the skin of a rhinoceros, but for the present we will stick to taxidermist.

So we have only the word taxidermist to cover all grades of preparators including those who have been aptly styled perpetrators, whose work can only be considered as art because it certainly is not nature.

As for manikins, these range from inanimate forms of wood and plaster, covered with the skins of wild beasts to those of flesh and blood, draped or undraped in silks and satins on whom are displayed the triumphs of the dressmaker's art. There have been forms carved in wood, or on a large scale, laboriously built after the manner of a small house; there have been shapes of iron and excelsior and tow, covered with clay in which were impressed details of anatomy; there have been casts of dead animals of paper or plaster, hollow or solid, and there have been some excellent forms consisting of a skeleton of wood clad in wire cloth on which the muscles were modeled in papier mache, but it remained for Akeley to combine their excellencies and omit their defects in the Akeley manikin.

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Akeley has told in his reminiscences how he became a taxidermist, but he has not told us that in my early days I, too, had ambitions in that line, though circumstances decided otherwise; as for Akeley, he shaped circumstances instead of being shaped by them. We both drew our inspiration from the same source, though Akeley did not know it. We do not always realize how the threads of our lives are interwoven with those of others, oft-times with those of people of whom we have never heard, and that Akeley and I should meet after many years was due to Prof. J. W. P. Jenks, whose name even was unknown to Akeley; for Professor Jenks imparted to my uncle his simple methods of taxidermy and my uncle taught me; also he published the little book on taxidermy, “price one dollar,” to which Akeley refers and from which he learned taxidermy up to a point where he felt justified in having business cards printed stating that he “did artistic taxidermy in all its branches.”

In one little particular Akeley errs in his memoirs, in thinking that the painted background he introduced in a group of birds, almost at the outset of his career, was the first of its kind: like other “inventions” this has been “discovered” several times, and even when he was painting the background, the Booth collection—begun in 1858—was well advanced.

As Booth wrote, “the chief object has been to endeavor to represent the birds in situations somewhat similar to those in which they were obtained, many of the cases, indeed, being copied from sketches taken on the actual spots where the birds themselves were shot.” And half a century earlier that universal genius, Charles Willson Peale, himself a taxidermist, wrote, “…it is not only pleasing to see a sketch of a landscape, but by showing the nest, a hollow cave, or a particular view of the country from which they came, some instances of the habits may be given.” Had Peale lived a hundred years later he would have been a leader in museum methods.

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Like Akeley I, too, went to “Wards,” preceding him by fifteen years, “graduating” five years before he came; and it was many years before we ever met, for it was not until 1912 that our paths came together and we became associated in the American Museum of Natural History.

How Akeley came to “Wards,” as Ward's Natural Science Establishment was briefly styled, he has recorded in In Brightest Africa and elsewhere, and here he worked from 1883 to 1887, not a very long time, but long enough to convince him that it was no place for him to develop his ideas of what taxidermy might be.

Even that time was shortened by a few months which he passed in the workshop—by no stretch of the imagination could it be called a studio—of John Wallace, a New York taxidermist who probably stuffed, most literally, more animals than any other one man.

Naturally, a commercial establishment, and particularly one that dealt mainly with the preparation of single specimens for museums, offered little opportunity for artistic, or naturalistic—call it what you will—taxidermy. For that was the era of the single specimen, the time when Coues wrote “'Spread eagle' styles of mounting, artificial rocks and flowers, etc., are entirely out of place in a collection of any scientific pretensions, or designed for popular instruction ….Birds look best, on the whole, in uniform rows, assorted according to size, as far as a natural classification allows.”

The severely simple was considered the proper style for museums, and one curator, whose name stands high in the list of zoologists, objected to the introduction of a bone as an excuse for a little action on the part of a coyote.

Truly tempora mutantur and there are times when 1 feel that now-a-days too little attention is being paid to single specimens and that their importance is not recognized, nor their value to a large proportion of visitors sufficiently appreciated.

A physician once told me that one of a doctor's most important duties was to tell his patients what not to do—so if Akeley did not gain much positive knowledge at Wards he saw many things that might be improved, and he did have an opportunity to study the problem of mounting large mammals, even if he did not have an opportunity to put the results of his observations into practice.

It was probably during his stay at Wards that Akeley reached the conclusion that the taxidermist had evolved from the upholsterer (as a matter of fact I have been asked “Who upholstered that specimen?”) and that the process of evolution had not gone very far. At any rate, he soon recognized that it was not possible to get good results from the methods then in vogue, which consisted mainly in turning an animal upside down and most literally “stuffing” it full of straw. Having recognized this fact, he set for himself what was to prove his life's task—the devising of processes by which the then existing order of things might be remedied.

It was at Wards that he first took part in mounting an elephant, the once famous Jumbo, whose name has been embodied in literature and handed down to posterity in dictionaries as a synonym for something big: And yet the majority of the present generation never heard of Jumbo. Had Rip Van Winkle lived in the present rapid age he might well have uttered his plaint—“Are we so soon forgot?”

In mounting Jumbo, Akeley was under the direction of his senior, J. William Critchley, and the elephant was mounted much after the fashion of the specimen in the Museum of Natural History, Paris, put up more than a century ago. Critchley was a versatile and skilled taxidermist, according to the standards of his day, who had few equals in mounting birds, and few superiors with the average mammal; he was selected on the advice of Doctor Hornaday as chief taxidermist for the growing Brooklyn Museum in 1903. He died in 1910.

However, before Jumbo was finished, it was Akeley who was supplying the ideas, but it was not until 1913, many years later, that he devised the method now employed for such large animals as rhino and elephants.

It was a tenet of the old-time taxidermy that skins must be tanned in a salt and alum bath both to “set” the epidermis and to dry hard so that they would retain their shape when dry. This method was not conducive to the longevity of specimens, and especially of our larger quadrupeds, which, if exposed to the changing atmosphere of our museum halls, soon went to pieces.

My doubts as to the permanency of museum specimens was aroused by an English report on bookbindings which reached the conclusion that nothing save Sumach Tanned Morocco leather was durable: and to tan a rhino—much less an elephant—with sumach seemed a somewhat difficult proposition.

When the big hippo Caliph, for twenty odd years a resident of the Central Park Zoo, was being mounted at the American Museum of Natural History (this was before my time), I remarked, as Cassandra might have, that it seemed a pity to cover such admirable modeling with skin that was pretty sure to go to pieces—as it did not many years later. For Caliph, prepared with great skill after methods long followed, slowly disintegrated under the stress of our dry-heated halls and within a decade was stripped of his skin, though still exhibitable on account of his excellent modeling.

Small wonder that, having so often seen specimens go to pieces, I had serious doubts on the subject of museum exhibits and was inclined to feel that it was a waste of time and money to mount animals doomed so soon to come to an untimely end; of what avail to make an animal live again if its second lifetime was to be no longer than the first, possibly even shorter.

Here again is where Akeley contributed to the improvement of museum methods, and after a little experimenting found that there was on the market a vegetable tan that fulfilled all the desired conditions and was just what he needed for such huge creatures as rhinos and elephants, a matter of great importance, since Akeley's latest methods of mounting large marnrnals, in which the skin was modeled directly upon the clay, depended largely on the successful tanning of the hide which must remain soft and flexible for many days and yet not even suffer the loss of any epidermis.

The final test is yet to come, for so far it has not been tried on a hippo, though there is no reason to believe that it will fail here, provided Akeley's careful procedure is followed.

It was while at Wards that Akeley, or rather the Museum World, had a narrow escape, for his friend, Professor Webster, advised him to study for entrance to the Sheffield Scientific School with the intent of following a professional career. His failure to do this was due to a breakdown in health which prevented him from taking the examination, and while later, at Milwaukee he was encouraged by Professor Wheeler to try again, fortunately the plan fell through; I say fortunately advisedly, for while there are multitudes of professors there are or have been few really good museum men, and only one Akeley. Still, it is doubtful if he would have remained a mere student, for owing to his mechanical bent he liked to do things with his own hands, to carry out his own ideas rather than follow those of others.

After four years Akeley “graduated” from Wards, not, because of what he had learned but because it offered no scope for his ever growing ideas, and in 1838 he followed his friend, Professor Wheeler, to Milwaukee.

In the Milwaukee Museum he had a little more scope for his talents, though at first hampered by museum traditions, and here he installed his first habitat group—of muskrats—in the making of which he tells us he was tolerated, rather than encouraged. Later, when Professor Wheeler became director of the Museum, Akeley was given the freedom he desired, though not until he went to Chicago did he have full scope for his talents.

Now, I our somewhat hazy as to just when Akeley began to be recognized as a leader in taxidermy and to whom belongs the credit for that recognition, but certainly in 1892 Mr. W. H. Holmes, then on tire staff of the Field Museum, selected him to mount a horse—and no animal is more difficult to mount—for one of the exhibits in the U. S. National Museum at Chicago in 1893. What may be called Akeley's first public recognition carne in 1895, at the first Sportsman's Show held in New York, where he obtained the first prize for the head of a Virginia deer entitled “The Challenge,” the most admired game piece in the exposition. Here again was a crossing of life's threads, for Theodore Roosevelt, who fourteen years later was to take part in an elephant hunt with Akeley, was the judge who awarded hire the prize.

From Milwaukee, in 1895, Akeley went to what was then the Field Columbian Museum where he had a chance to put into practice ideas and methods that had been awaiting an opportunity, and after his first African expedition in which he showed his skill as a collector, year after year he installed the groups that were figured in the reports of the rapidly growing institution. Here, as an incident, he invented the cement gun, one of the few inventions that brought him any financial returns, and here his fertile brain devised many improvements in museums and museum methods, some of which are still untried.

It was at the Field Museum, in 1902, that Akeley installed his “Four Seasons,” four groups of the Virginia deer amid their appropriate surroundings in spring, summer, autumn, and winter. These, begun during his stay in Milwaukee, had long been in course of preparation, and when they were secured by the Museum, Akeley, as is often the case with inventors, found that while he “had come out even on expenditures for labor and material, for his own time and for profit there was nothing.” That he met with similar experiences later in his career was due to the fact that he placed excellence first and profit last, and if, in the course of a piece of work, he saw a way in which it could be improved, he never failed to use it, though at the loss of time and profit to himself. This was probably the principal reason why the taxidermy establishment, carried on by Akeley in Milwaukee was not successful, although it had the support of the Museum; really good work is so expensive that it cannot be carried on commercially at a profit.

The “Four Seasons” were originally mounted to be seen by daylight., for at the time of their construction electric lighting was still young and only gradually finding its way into museums, and then in very simple forms.

A point to be borne in mind is that our predecessors in museum work were sadly handicapped by the question of lighting and a goodly share of the credit for the beauty of modern museum groups is really due to the development of electric lighting; here, as in other branches of museum methods, Akeley was quick to recognize its possibilities, and had in mind many devices for the projected African Hall.

It was while engaged upon the “Four Seasons,” whose surrounding foliage called for many thousand leaves, that Akeley devised the simple, rapid, and economical methods of making leaves now so universally employed in American museums, and introduced the use of metal molds to replace those of plaster that so soon deteriorated.

The Mintorn brothers, and their sister, Mrs. Mogridge, had developed a method of reproducing foliage and flowers, employed by them in the British Museum bird groups, and later brought by them to the American Museum of Natural History, where it was used in the small bird groups that in their day stood for high-water mark in groups. The results obtained by the Mintorns were very beautiful but, as time showed, they would not stand the test of our varying museum atmosphere, with its summer's moisture and winter's dryness, but curled up, so in the American Museum of Natural History they have in most instances been replaced; moreover the process was somewhat complicated and involved the use of a mysterious “fabric,” which later proved to lie mousselaine de soie, and it has given way to the simpler, more durable method of Akeley.

Akeley patented his process for reproducing leaves, but never, to my knowledge, asked any royalty for its use; in fact, I do not think that he ever received any money from those who employed his methods or accepted any fee for imparting thorn to others. Not only this, but at the Chicago meetings of the American Association of Museums in May, 1908, he explained in detail the making of the manikin, an explanation which led Mr. H. L. Ward, then director of the Milwaukee Museum to remark “this address of Mr. Akeley…seems to be epoch making…the rnan of whom I can say without fear of accusation of flattery that he has done more for taxidermy in America than any other one person, gives to us, friends, acquaintances,, and strangers, a full and detailed exposition of his method of mammalian taxidermy.”

The lure of Africa and the opportunity to secure and install a full group of elephants drew Akeley to the American Museum of Natural History in 1909, and when, in 1912, he returned from a three years' collecting trip, he and I were together for the first time. And here I saw him develop his last, and most revolutionary process for mounting great mammals, a process that was not perfected until the work of mounting the first elephant was actually in hand, when Akeley discarded the frame already made for the manikin, abandoned his original plan, and proceeded to carry out the method then and since used for big quadrupeds. The group intended for the center of the African Hall bears testimony to the success of the method, and the Asiatic elephants and other large mammals mounted for the Asiatic Hall, show how well it has been followed by his associates.

It was while engaged on this group of elephants that he perfected his plans for the African Hall, which had long been uppermost in his thoughts, which he looked forward to as the culmination of his life's work, but which, it was decreed, must he left for others to carry into execution.

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Like many another genius, he did not live to see the realization of his fondest hopes, to see his vision of a great African Hall taking tangible form: he was cut down at the very moment when success seemed near and his dream about to come true. The mind that planned and the hand that executed are stilled in death, the mortal part of Akeley reposes on the distant slopes of Mount Mikeno, but his spirit lives, and the work to which he devoted so many years and so much of his best thought will be carried on by those to whom he imparted his ideas and imbued with his enthusiasm. And on them devolves the task of executing a fitting monument to his memory.

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