If you are looking to fill any idle days with idle thought.... I
have copied and pasted a taster:
Chapter XII
White, crimson, emerald green, shining golden
yellow, are amongst the colours seen in the eyes of birds. In
owls, herons, cormorants, and many other tribes, the
brightly-tinted eye is incomparably the finest feature and chief
glory. It fixes the attention at once, appearing like a splendid
gem, for which the airy bird-body, with its graceful curves and
soft tints, forms an appropriate setting. When the eye closes in
death, the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere bundle
of dead feathers; crystal globes may be put into the empty
sockets, and a bold life-imitating attitude given to the stuffed
specimen; but the vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like flames,
the “passion and the fire whose fountains are within” have
vanished, and the best work of the taxidermist, who has given a
life to his bastard art, produces in the mind only sensations of
irritation and disgust. In museums, where limited space stands in
the way of any abortive attempts at copying nature too closely,
the stuffer’s work is endurable because useful; but in a
drawing-room, who does not close his eyes or turn aside to avoid
seeing a case of stuffed birds — those unlovely mementoes of death
in their gay plumes? Who does not
shudder, albeit not with fear, to see the wild cat, filled with
straw, yawning horribly, and trying to frighten the spectator with
its crockery glare? I shall never forget the first sight I had of
the late Mr. Gould’s collection of humming-birds (now in the
National Museum), shown to me by the naturalist himself, who
evidently took considerable pride in the work of his hands. I had
just left tropical nature behind me across the Atlantic, and the
unexpected meeting with a transcript of it in a dusty room in
Bedford Square gave me a distinct shock. Those pellets of dead
feathers, which had long ceased to sparkle and shine, stuck with
wires — not invisible — over blossoming cloth and tinsel bushes,
how melancholy they made me feel!
From: Idle Days in Patagonia, by W. H. Hudson
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hudson/william_henry/idle/chapter12.html
