Tour the Smithsonian After its First Fifty Years

Department of Reptiles and Batrachians

Though the series of alcoholic specimens and skeletons of this department numbers 20,000 entries from North America, and 8,000 from abroad, comparatively little is on exhibition. A few living and frequently changed snakes in wire cages, a congregation of turtles entertained at the Carp ponds, stuffed crocodilia, a series of excellent skeletons, and about 100 models and casts, comprise the whole display. This, nevertheless, fairly well illustrates the range of the reptilia on this continent, and it marks a very important advance in taxidermy.

" The large turtles have been imitated in papier-mache, and the smaller turtles and the snakes cast in plaster, posed in the most natural attitudes, and painted with life-like fidelity. In the case of the serpents, particularly, this method has produced effects as superior to stuffing as one of Landseer's drawings is beyond the etching on a shin-bone by an idle savage of neolithic days. They lurk in tight coils, with heads upheld and nervous tails; they twine in sinuous folds over and under barky twigs; they glide with undulating ease across a path; in one instance they interlace in death struggles, the knots of which were not tied by the imagination of the workman, but cast from the bodies of two contestants, whose fury was caught in the fixity of a chloroform sleep."

Among the skeletons will be observed plaster restorations of several fossil reptiles and batrachians of huge size, that lived

" Long, long ago
When the schthyosaurus,
By the banks of the Taurus,
And the pterodactyl
By the gurgling rill
Danced in the moonbeams' glow "

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