58RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINSpower is an inextricable entity enmeshed with objective capacities (skills
and preexisting knowledge) and communication (dissemination of
knowledge, exchange of information).^63 It becomes a transformative agent
affecting the processual aspects of the discursive relationships in which
actions actively modify other actions in the attempt of producing a nexus
between what is seen and what can be said.
To acquire a certain commodity value, inanimate “natural objects”
have to be durable. It is not, therefore, a coincidence that some of the most
important challenges involved in preser ving ta xidermy have been posed
by moths, mites, and mold.^64 It has been claimed that all taxidermists had
their own, more or less efficient, secret recipe to prevent decay. James
Petiver was among the first to compile a written set of methods for the
preservation of specimens. However, most of the techniques, such as
keeping the animal bodies in salted water, rum, or brandy, substantially
discolored plumage and fur.^65 French scientist René Antoine Ferchault
de Réaumur proposed, among other techniques, baking the specimens
in a warm, but not too hot, oven.^66 These preventive measures, however,
proved only temporarily effective in the fight against decay. Most notably,
in 1738, Jean-Baptiste Bécœur, an apothecary from Metz in northern
France, began experimenting with different chemicals for the purpose
of preserving animal skins. By 1743 he had invented the formula for ar-
senical soap. However, Bécœur died without disclosing his secret—he
had hoped to be able to sell it and recoup some of the costs incurred in
creating it—and thirty years elapsed before the formula was published.
Many engravings illustrating Renaissance wunderkammers reveal the
presence of preserved birds, of which today no trace remains. These pre-
served animals essentially were commodities prone to decay. They did not
look much like the original animal they derived from because of the pres-
ervation techniques that were used, and they were probably regularly re-
placed in the whimsical and idiosyncratic cabinets of curiosities. Instead,
the fascinating search for the best preservations methods that took place
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was driven by the new
discursive formation of natural history. The discourses shaping the prac-
tices of collecting, taxonomy, and archiving imposed the paramount
necessity of new techniques to preserve animal skins in their natural
appearance as closely as possible (to serve taxonomic purposes) and for
as long as possible (to function as reference specimens). Thanks to the