that I was mounting. Many people who saw these clay models would suggest that I have them cast in bronze. If I had not still had the fever of sculpturing in my blood, these remarks would not have stuck in my mind, but as it was they did. So this idea became familiar to me.
However, it was a good many years after it first became a regular inhabitant of my mind that I put it in practice, for along with it had grown up the notion that I should not merely turn models into bronzes but that I would wait until I had a real contribution. Real contributions did not seem abundant and so year after year went by with no bronzes made.
Then in 1912 a situation arose which I thought forced sculpture upon me. I had a dream of a great African Hall of forty groups of animals with all the ingenuity, all the technique, and all the art the country could boast of. By that time I had come to feel that taxidermy could be a great art. I felt that a beautifully modelled animal required at least as much knowledge, taste, skill, and technique as a bronze or stone animal. But I knew that this conception was not common. A taxidermist couldn't talk art. Especially he couldn't talk art convincingly to the kind of men who supported great museum ventures. It was a recognized thing to support art. Taxidermy had no such tradition. The only way out of the dilemma that I could see was to prove that whether or not taxidermy was an art at least a taxidermist could be an artist.
It was my desire to make an appeal to those men
