Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/40

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who would have the vision to plan groups and the skill to model them and who would be furnished with skilled assistance in the making of the manikins and accessories and in the mounting of the animals. And it seemed as if the dream were about to come true. About this time I had a conference with Dr. Herman Bumpus, then director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He told me that he had then at the museum a young man named James Clark who could model but who did not know the technique of making manikins and mounting animals. The result of our talk was that Clark came out to my shop in Chicago and together we went through the whole process, mounting a doe which now stands in the American Museum. But the old museum trouble broke out again. It cost a lot to mount animals in the method which Clark brought back. So there was pressure to reduce the cost and, under this pressure, the methods, in the words of O. Henry, "were damaged by improvements." However, in the course of time it was demonstrated that while it often happens that an honest effort to make a thing better often makes it cheaper also, an effort merely to cheapen a thing very seldom makes it better.

In the meanwhile, in 1905, I went to Africa again, to collect zoölogical material for the Field Museum.

Again, in 1909, I went, this time for the American Museum of Natural History. I stayed two years, studying elephants, lions, and lion spearing. When I got back and set to work mounting the elephant group in the American Museum in New York, I dis-