PRESERVATION OF THE SKIN.--The next step depends upon what you propose to do with the skin, or it may depend upon the conditions under which you are collecting. 1. If you are in your laboratory preparing skins to mount, preserve them all (except quite young specimens and certain others) in a soft, or wet state, in a salt-and-alum bath. 2. If you are in the field (especially the tropics), making a large collection of mammal skins for mounting, by all means do the same if possible. 3. If the skins are for purposes of study _as skins_, during which frequent handling and examination is absolutely necessary, make them up as dry skins. 4. If you lack facilities for preserving them wet, then make dry skins of them. 5. If the necessities of travel and transportation make it necessary to reduce the weight to the lowest possible limit, and to divide it up for carriage overland, make up all skins dry, both little and big. 6. If you have only one or two skins to preserve, it will be less trouble to you to make them up dry at once.
_A._ THE SALT-AND-ALUM BATH.--This is the finest solution ever discovered for the preservation of the skins of quadrupeds that are destined to be mounted. It is inexpensive, simple, and easy to make; its action is perfect; its strength can be regulated to suit any kind of a skin; it never gets stale; and if properly handled will preserve a skin for a hundred years in the same pliable and elastic condition as when it leaves the animal's back. In only two or three instances have I ever known it to change the color of the hair in the least. Every taxidermist knows that it is far easier to mount a fresh specimen in fine style than an old, dry skin which has lost all its elasticity. The work on a soft skin (_i.e._, one which has never been dried) can be done more easily, more quickly, and vastly better. With a dry skin you can make only what it will let you; but with a wet skin you can make just as fine a mount as your skill is capable of producing. And with the latter it makes no difference whether the skin came off the animal last week or ten years ago, except in the case of very young animals. Of these the bath softens the leg bones. For years it has been my custom to preserve all skins that I expect to mount (except the young of the smaller species) in this salt-and-alum bath, and it is almost superfluous to add that I strongly advise all others to do the same. In many ways it is a _great economy_ to do so.