His next birthday found him in Sarawak on the island of Borneo. The year just passed had seen many more adventures. Flying foxes and anteaters, giant turtles and slender gibbons, orangutans, queer-looking dugongs, and giant snakes had crossed his path. He had visited the house where a head-hunting tribe of Dyaks kept their trophies. “The heads, or rather skulls, hang in a semi-circle around one side of the room, and there are forty-two of them in all,” he wrote in his journal. “The collection as a whole is in very good condition, the specimens being moderately clean and not at all smoked. Some have been very carelessly taken, I regret to say, as is shown by the way they are split open or slashed across with parongs (knives); and from some, large pieces have been hacked out.” Half in jest, the scientist noted that “none of the skulls is labeled with locality, date, sex, and species, as crania always should be, to be valuable.”
Before coming to Borneo he had gone hunting on the Malay Peninsula, and before that he had spent three months in Ceylon, following instructions from Professor Ward.
“Plunder Ceylon,” the Professor had written. “Rake the island over as with a fine-toothed comb; catch everything you can, and send me the best of it.”
His headquarters in Colombo, the chief city of Ceylon, were two ground-floor rooms opening on a paved patio. Here he received the dozen or so natives he had sent out to gather specimens that he would buy. In just one day he listed the following items: three soft-shelled turtles, one tortoise, forty-nine crabs of three different kinds, fifteen sea cockroaches, twelve green lizards, four ordinary lizards, two bats, nine jumping fish, one horned skate, six fish of various species, four prawns, and about one hundred shells of many species. Each was cleaned, preserved, and labeled with its common and Latin names. The next day brought snakes of various kinds, frogs, fish, and invertebrates, all of which he shipped home to Rochester.
Now at last he was winding up his jungle tours and beginning the long return journey, “Never has a country used me better or sent me away fuller handed,” he said when he sailed from Sarawak to Singapore two weeks later. “It’s too bad I didn’t have a score of friends here to enjoy it with me.”
He regretted leaving, but he was glad to be on his way home. He would be seeing Josephine again, the young woman he would soon marry.
In April of 1879 he was back in Rochester. Only a few hours after his return he presented to Professor Ward a sketch of a mounted animal display that he wished to prepare, a sketch based upon a group of orangutans he had seen fighting viciously in the treetops in Borneo. The sketch was revolutionary: Several animals were to be mounted together, not just standing, but in a setting that was to be a copy of an actual section of a real forest. There were to be two large male orangs fighting, a female orang with a baby clinging to her breast, looking for a safer and higher perch, and a young orang looking down from a nest in a higher tree.
Such a group had never been done before. Until that time specimens had been mounted alone or, if in groups, standing still, never posed as in real life, and never engaged in real activity. But in his years of observing jungle life as it really was, Hornaday had determined to change all that.
Unlike most taxidermists, he had seen with his own eyes how wild animals really walk, stand, run. He had even taught himself to sketch so he could record the scenes he came upon, and preserve for himself the way an animal looked and what it did in its own home or natural habitat. No longer would he pose a mounted specimen from someone else’s drawing in a book. After all, that artist probably had never seen what he was drawing.
He couldn’t wait to get started.
Since coming to Ward’s, he had proved to the stern professor that he knew what he was talking about. He had certainly gotten results on all of his field trips, even the first. And the collections he had made on this last trip were truly astounding. So, although these ideas were new to him, Ward gave him permission to go ahead with his project.
From April to September he worked on his orang group. He was so busy with it that he waited until its completion, in September, to marry his “guardian angel.”
He gave his display, which was complete with the necessary jungle foliage, a title: “Fight in the Treetops.” While working on it he had also written a scientific paper about the orangutans of Borneo. Ward was so pleased he sent the “Fight” group to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to be shown at its annual meeting. Hornaday went along too, to read his paper.
One of the scientists present was Professor George Brown Goode, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Then and there he offered the twenty-five-year-old Hornaday the position, vacant at the time, of chief taxidermist to the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum. But Hornaday would not leave Rochester until he finished working on the specimens he had collected. He also planned to write a book, based on his journal, about his adventures.
His fellow-workers at Ward’s were inspired by this new approach. With Hornaday as the leader, Ward’s became the focal point of a new movement in taxidermy. That winter he proposed that they form an organization to attract attention to their new methods, and to improve the quality of museum exhibits throughout the country. In his and Josephine’s Rochester home the Society of American Taxidermists was founded. Frederick S. Webster, who specialized in bird mounting (Hornaday called him a wizard at it), was elected president. Hornaday himself asked for, and got, the job of secretary. He wanted to correspond with other members of the profession and with zoologists and naturalists so he could propagandize for the new ideas.
The society held its first exhibition in Rochester later that year. Taxidermists throughout the country were invited to submit specimens to compete for various prizes. Three museum men who were thought by the society to be sympathetic to its cause were selected as judges. Hornaday’s fighting orangs won first prize. But the second prize went to a solitary wood-duck on a pedestal.
They were all disappointed, and no one more so than Frederick Webster, the duck’s creator. For in giving it the prize the judges had overlooked his other entry. This was a realistic group of three flamingoes, two standing at the edge of a real-looking lagoon, the third sitting on a mud nest nearby. Webster had made it painstakingly, in his free time after work at Ward’s, and at his own expense. The other charter members of the society considered it to be an excellent example of the kind of taxidermy they wanted to do. They had all been rooting for it.
When the judges further declared that dramatic groups of animals such as Hornaday’s were not suitable for display in scientific museums, the group’s disappointment was complete.
They were somewhat encouraged that the American Museum of Natural History in New York had ordered a large group to be mounted by Hornaday, to be called “The Orangutan at Home.” But they knew it would be many years before the museums and the public were convinced. The society had plenty of work to do.
By the time the society was ready for its third exhibition, held in New York in 1883, Hornaday had taken Dr. Goode’s offer and was Chief Taxidermist at the National Museum. The “Fight In the Treetops” had been bought from Professor Ward by the Smithsonian Institution for the museum, and had followed Hornaday to Washington. Now his work was displayed before the whole nation. It was a beginning, and an opportunity. If only the public would respond, showing a preference for such groups over the lifeless displays shown everywhere else.
The week before the New York exhibition was to open, one of the sponsors, who had promised $500 toward the expenses of renting space, backed out and broke his word. The taxidermists were in a fix, and Hornaday considered himself responsible.
Fortunately he recalled that Andrew Carnegie, whom he had met during his East Indies trip, was at that very moment in New York. Hurriedly packing a valise, he left Washington to call upon the millionaire.
With all the eloquence he could muster, he explained the program and purposes of the society, and how useful his group was going to be in developing the museums of the United States. Hesitantly, he asked for a loan of $500, to be repaid when the society could afford it.
“What?” asked Mr. Carnegie. “Is five hundred dollars all you need?”
Blushing, the representative of American taxidermy admitted that it was.
“Well,” came the welcome response, “I will give you that, and you need not bother to return it!”
This unexpected generosity led Hornaday to propose that Carnegie be made the society’s treasurer for a year, and he was surprised that the famous industrialist did not even laugh at the suggestion. Instead, he gravely accepted, and for that year the group’s financial standing was, as its executive secretary proudly stated, “as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.” This was the first, but not the last, time that Hornaday would enlist Carnegie in the cause of zoology.
His mounted young African elephant, Mungo, won first prize at the competition. And this was a triumph for another new idea. During the months and years that he had been abroad collecting skins and skeletons, he had also been gathering ideas about what to do with them. When he butchered animals he had seen how the muscles fit into the flesh, and how the bones shape the body. When he mounted his animals he would not make puffy-looking faces or round, club-like legs, arms, and fingers. In the field he had realized how ridiculous the round legs and strawfilled bodies looked, compared to the real thing. He would build up his mounted animals as nature built them in life. He would construct a skeleton first. If the animals’ own bones and skull were handy he would use them; if not, he would teach himself to carve duplicates out of wood. For the fleshy part of the body he wanted some material that would hold its shape. The tow or straw that other taxidermists were using was all wrong. So was the way they packed it into the skin. Their animals had hard barrel-like bodies at first; after a year or so they sagged, bulged, got limp, and looked stuffed. His, he resolved, would look real, alive. He would breathe new life into stuffed animals!
Mungo was the ultimate test of the new method. Hornaday had first built a skeleton-like structure called a manikin, and then covered it with an enormous quantity of clay before shaping the skin on it. This was his solution to the problem of shaping the animal’s body realistically. And the prize vindicated his efforts.
This was not the only innovation unveiled in New York that year. Until this time mounted mammals were displayed without any kind of background whatever. Although bird displays were given a background treatment, only a suggestion of the natural surroundings was made: this was usually a watercolor representation of sky and clouds. But now Hornaday showed his display against a setting realistically painted and complete down to the last detail. This had never been attempted anywhere before. And the fact that he was showing not only birds but also a mammal against such a background made it all the more startling. His effort showed a white setter dog pointing a covey of bobwhite quail—the dog was obviously about to lead a hunter to the game. He had hired an artist to paint a complete landscape, showing the country—the environment—in which the dog and birds lived.
“Coming to the Point” won a prize, but in the special category of ornamental taxidermy. He was disappointed, for he had hoped, as a result of his work, to gain acceptance for painted backgrounds in museum displays.
His disappointment would last for a long time. Even ten years later he would sadly comment, “As vet the museums will have no painted backgrounds.” But he predicted that some day they would, and that then they would be “as attractive and pleasing as the picture galleries.”
He lived to see it come true. And his efforts, and those of his colleagues, helped. Dr. Goode helped, too. It was Dr. Goode’s idea to give credit to both the taxidermist and the background artist by including their names on the museum labels. But most of all the public helped, by recognizing the difference and responding to it.
Hornaday himself became known to the public after publication of his book, Two Years in the Jungle. Readers enjoyed his adventures, and absorbed jungle lore through his observant eyes. Boys read it, and decided to become naturalists or hunters when they grew up.
The book was dedicated to “My Good Wife Josephine.”