52RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINSDictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle, in relation to the preservation of larger
animals of a specific shape such as sharks and crocodiles, Dufresne men-
tioned that empailler was the main technique in use (“bourrés avec de la
paille”) and further explained that this technique had been replaced by
monter (“que nous avons réformé pour y substituer celui de monter”). In-
terestingly, in this text, Dufresne stated that “taxidermy has only made
progress in the past fifty years.”^44 And in the English translation of this
expanded text, which was published in 1820, the above-mentioned passage
is followed by a line clarifying that mounted “does not perfectly express
the idea we would convey but it is always more correct than the former”
(stuffed).^45
Through the nineteenth century, a series of (at times nonattributed)
English translations of Dufresne’s work emerged. Some of these trans-
lations made the subject accessible to scientists in the United States.
Paying attention to the agential qualities of taxidermie, its effect on the
discourses and practices of mounting animal skins, shows how natural
history effectively appropriated the practice of stuffing skins and molded
it to fit its taxonomic needs. This operation evidences a rupture in the
constructed fluidity of taxidermy metanarratives. Never is this essential
moment in which the linguistic and the material intertwine given any
relevance, possibly because it also problematizes the simplistic distinction
between “good” and “bad” taxidermy that most authors regularly en-
dorse.^46 In Scientific Taxidermy for Museums, drafted by R. W. Shufeldt
for the Smithsonian Museum in 1892, attempted to distance scientific
taxidermy from stuffed skins by stating that the work of “Thomas
Brown... had its due influence in lifting taxidermy from the realm of an
ignoble pursuit to the broad platform of one of the most important and
exact of all the sciences.”^47 The implication is rather clear: a progressivist
vision of the history of taxidermy defines the discipline as a developing
succession of improvements motivated by a transcendental notion of a yet
unrealized but implicitly shared master idea: hypernaturalism. The as-
sumption is that the result of this developmental chain is “natural history
taxidermy” and that the “ignoble pursuit” of stuffing animals somehow
disappeared entirely through the development of new techniques. Stuffed
animals, with their approximated and nonnaturalistic forms, essentially
constituted sedimentations of discourses very different from those of nat-
ural history. Stuffed animals were not bad taxidermy, as many authors
state. Perfect realism simply was not the preponderant value endorsed by