AFRICA UNDER GLASS

Shown on the opposite page are picture windows on a far continent--two of the four new dioramas unveiled this week at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. They bring the academy's total of dioramas to 36, rivaling in number--and in quality--those of any natural history museum in the world.

Despite the advantages, and popularity, of this kind of integrated display over the old-fashioned stuffed-animal-on-a-pedestal type, it is impossible for museumkeepers to supply the demand. It takes time and money, skill and patience, to create good dioramas. First, a hunter has to bag some subjects worth putting on display. After that, at least four experts are needed: a taxidermist to make the animals look alive again, a propmaker and a landscape painter to imitate their native surroundings, and a cabinetmaker to seal the whole display under glass.

Dioramas are the joint result of a patient group effort. Perfect shading of the background picture into the real soil of the foreground is the first essential in achieving realism. This and other near-perfections were accomplished by the artists who made San Francisco's new exhibits. The animals were shot by a Berkeley mining engineer and big-game hunter named Leslie Simson. He found a home for the carcasses at the academy, and when he died in 1940 left $100,000 to insure their proper display. Academy Director of Exhibits Cecil Tose, who did the taxidermy himself, directed the project. Prop Artist Velma Harris cut and painted the paper vegetation--and, incidentally, put to good use some African bamboo stalks that had been in the storeroom for 21 years. Two painstaking realists, Belmore Brown and Toshio Asaeda, did the background landscapes.

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