A less driven person would have been discouraged; Akeley, not quite sixteen, was not. He quit the farm and had business cards printed: ARTISTIC TAXIDERMY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES. Three years later, in 1883, he began an apprenticeship at Ward's Natural Science Establishment. When he showed up there, he must have been astonished by what lurked inside: barrels, boxes, and crates brimming with the most exotic beasts and birds—kangaroos, koalas, opossums, fish, polar bears, dugongs, gorillas, narwhales—all of which had been snared in Professor Henry Ward's "universal dragnet." "Neither the elephant nor the whale is too strong to break through," enthused Hornaday, who had left Ward's in 1882 and himself had once sent twenty-six cases of crocodiles, tigers, Indian bison, and "monkeys galore" to the emporium. Although Ward had posted a sign on the gate that said, "This is not a museum but a working establishment," people were no doubt transfixed by the place. Inside, a colorful group of long-bearded Europeans and other free spirits scraped whale bones, polished rocks, assembled buffalo skeletons, and preserved orangutans. One hall contained human skeletons (hung by their necks) and mottled snakeskins; another held all the wonders of the sea—shells, corals, starfish, and sponges. There were fossils and meteorites, the strangest and most marvelous things imaginable.
All these treasures ended up in museums and colleges. Chicago's Field Museum was founded in a single day when dry goods tycoon Marshall Field saw Ward's magnificent quarry at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, paid $100,000 for the entire hoard, and set up shop. Another big customer, Louis Agassiz of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, bought hundreds of specimens from Ward's: he wanted to acquire the entire animal kingdom in specimen form to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution.
Unscientific and profit driven, Ward's was basically a taxidermy factory—this in spite of Hornaday and the other SAT founders who worked there. At Ward's, men literally stuffed animals. The specimens had no vitality, none of the gloss or vibrancy of wild creatures. Akeley was appalled. He saw men filling raw skins with greasy bones, straw, and rags until they bulged, creating disfigured zebras with exposed seams and lopsided deer. They weren't anatomically sculpted; they were, as he put it, "upholstered."
But that's exactly what most museums wanted pre-Tree-Tops: specimens as raw data. The first natural history museums attempted to create a complete inventory of nature by accumulating everything that roamed, swam, and crawled the earth. They were primarily formed around magnificent private collections, the stately cabinets of kings, princes, and rich adventurers who explored the unknown reaches of the earth or hired others to hunt for them in search of new species to bring back to England, Europe, and America. The British Museum, for example, was founded in 1753 when England bought Dr. Hans Sloane's amazing personal collection: 19,290 animal specimens and fossils. In 1869, the year it was founded, the AMNH purchased Prince Maximilian of Wied's preserved menagerie of 4,000 birds and 600 mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. The AMNH later bought paleontologist James Hall's fossil collection (1875); P. T. Barnum's iguana and "one Human Hand"; and Jules Verreaux's unrivaled collection of 2,800 stuffed birds, 220 animals, and 400 skeletons. Most early preserved specimens were crude approximations, but since science had never seen anything as strange as, say, a kangaroo—Captain James Cook brought the first kangaroo skin to London in 1771—they were still marvels to behold.
Taxidermy fared better at the small private museums such as Charles Willson Peale's Repository for Natural Curiosities in Philadelphia (1784–1845) and William Bullock's London Museum of Stuffed Animals (1809–1819), but these immensely popular establishments had been closed long before the big museums were ready to embrace artistic taxidermy for public education ("rational amusement" in Peale's day; "edutainment" in ours). Still, Peale's repository bears mentioning. Peale was a famous portraitist who used his artistic skill to animate taxidermy. He had no formal scientific training, but he believed in portraying nature accurately, to the extent that he manufactured glass eyes and carved limbs out of wood, even displaying his birds in front of painted skies. (In Europe, birds were displayed scientifically, singly on white paper.) Although his birds were arranged systematically (unlike the kaleidoscopic curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), his repository also contained a five-legged cow, stuffed monkeys posed as humans, an exhibit debunking the popular notion that elk breathe through their tear ducts, a lock of human hair from an albino, four-inch shoes worn by a Chinese woman, a snake den, and, in the yard behind Independence Hall, a live menagerie. What cemented his fame as a naturalist, however, wasn't his artificial ponds, his superior use of arsenic, or even his prairie wolf clobbering a mule deer, but rather his "mastodon" skeleton, which was really a mammoth he called "the Carnivorous Elephant of the North." When Peale wasn't singing "Yankee Doodle" inside the mammoth's reticulated skeleton with a cohort of chums or conversing with his sons—Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Vandyke, Charles Linnaeus, and Benjamin Franklin (some of whom shot the birds that he himself preserved)—he liked to think the massive skeleton proved that animals were indeed as large in America as they were in Europe (and so, incidentally, were American men). You get the picture.
By the mid-1800s, especially after Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, museums, obsessed with taxonomy, prepared specimens in a way to facilitate comparative morphology—the study of an organism's form and structure. Comparative morphology did not happen on the banks of the Sadong River, but inside the dark museum, aptly called the "closet." Although this practice allowed science to progress, it basically killed taxidermy. The big public museums, you see, generally employed the worst taxidermists—or, rather, the fastest ones: taxidermists whose unintentional anatomical blunders would prejudice the way people would view dodos, goblin sharks, and other species for generations. Pioneering field
