Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/407

Rh Collection, and many who can spare the cash and not the time or energy, will gladly rely on professional assistance. As our author remarks, there is really no reason for "the narrow way in which most professional taxidermists bolster up their art in a secret and entirely unnecessary manner—unnecessary because no amateur can, but by the severest application, possibly compete with the experience of the technical or professional worker."

We cannot pretend to criticise a book which demands a special and technical knowledge. Mr. Browne is an advocate of non-arsenical preservatives, which perhaps prejudice alone may have prevented our having personally used. There are also to be found the recipes for numerous preservative fluids both for fish and reptiles, some well known and others apparently novel. Besides these, we are told how to fight and overcome museum pests, the material with which to mend broken specimens, how to clean skins and prepare microscopic objects, and to fit up cases and cabinets; of course the directions to skin and set up mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, &c, are fully detailed, and the volume concludes with advice on museum arrangement. We have found so many useful hints in the perusal of this manual that we now regard it as a friend on the book-shelf to be often consulted, for there are few zoologists who are not collectors, and few collections that do not sometimes give anxiety. This is a subject which might well find a place in our "Notes and Queries."