Fishes, Lions

A great loggerhead turtle is posed in frantic flight in an exhibition case of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. Its neck is stretched far forward; its flippers beat the water; its runty tail sticks straight out behind. Driving after the turtle are several varieties of sharks--leathery bodies, cold, piggish eyes, blunt snouts all straining towards the prey.

Sharks and turtle are dead & stuffed, mounted realistically to show museum visitors what roving sea life is like. That exhibit is the best and key of a whole Hall of Fishes of the World, formally opened in the museum last week. Groups represent lake, river and ocean fish life, from trout to rays (flattened sharks). Each scene makes the visitor feel as if he were under water, peering inquisitively.

Creating such realistic scenes is the new aim of natural history museums. The American Museum has several groups of wild animals in natural surroundings. Last week it received seven lion skins, brought back from Tanganyika district of East Africa by its Carlisle-Clark African expedition. The lions will be posed at the edge of a thicket near one of the great granite boulders that stick up out of the African plains. In the distance will be herds of game (painted on a back drop). It will be sunset, the lions wakening up, stretching themselves. One lioness, with a few bristles on her Irishman's long upper lip, will be on her feet, ready to hunt.*

The date of the American Museum's opening of its Hall of Fishes was a sad mischance. Guest of honor was to have been Dr. Bashford Dean, retired and honorary curator of ichthyology, who had planned the fish collection. An astonishingly different interest of his was in arms & armor. He knew more about arms & armor than any man in this country and aimed to make the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art rank next after those in Paris, Madrid and Denver. Rarely has a man held active curatorship in two great museums, and of such separated fields. A few years ago he helped compile a bibliography of every written reference to fishes, from classical times to the present. It made three great tomes and brought him a National Academy of Science medal.

He yearned to attend last week's opening. But he was bed-ridden at Battle Creek, Mich., from a major operation. The night after the opening he died.

-Proud though the American Museum is of its fish and animal collections, it is prouder of (and more famed for) its bird and dinosaur collections. Pride of other U. S. museums: Chicago's Field, botanical material; Washington's National, technical progress; San Francisco's Golden Gate, habitat groups of North American animals; Denver's Colorado, arrow heads and prehistoric bison: Washington's Red Cross, war material: Yale, fossil vertebrates; Harvard, birds and glass flowers.