ut. Legs and head and neck are next filled
with sawdust, tamped in with a blunt piece of rod or wire or piece of
wood shaped for the purpose. Fill in the front legs and head first and
stuff some tow behind them to hold the sawdust in place when the
specimen is reversed to fill hind legs. After these are filled, stuff
the shell full of tow.

Position the turtle and wire upon a piece of board for a temporary base.

Finish shaping with a whittled modeling tool. Stuff the skin in front of
hind legs into proper concavity with wads of tow or cotton and leave
these until the specimen is dried.

Stuff the eye sockets with chopped tow. Wipe inside the eyelids a little
liquid glue and carefully set the eyes, using care to preserve natural
fullness of the ball under lids.

In drying, the tip of the nose will shrink away. When the specimen is
dry and the nose-wire is cut off, a wax tip may be modeled on, nostrils
being punched into it with a bit of wire.

To set the wax nose, with a sharp knife trim away the shrunken tip,
place a bit of wax upon the socket, and melt it into firm contact with a
heated wire. Shape the artificial nose with a small wooden modeling
tool. Replace faded colors of turtles with thin tints of tube colors.

An ideal method of mounting turtles is to finish head, neck, legs, and
tail in compo. No. II.

Use the leg bones and wrap them thinly with tow. Wrap a small, hard, tow
neck upon the wire and a thin tow core upon the tail-wire. Cover these
cores, to natural size of muscles, with papier mache.

Cover the skull where meat was scraped from jaws. Push the neck, tail
and legs into place and wire to shell as in Fig. 27. Stuff shell with
tow to hold papier mache filling of limbs in place until dry.

Turtles mounted in this way should be positioned upon a board, modeled
with a tool into anatomical lines of neck, legs, etc., and allowed to
remain wired upon the board until the compo. begins to harden.

When this is well under way, take the turtle from the board and finish
drying, wrong side up in a well ventilated place. Remove the tow from
inside the shell to allow of quicker evaporation. Turtles mounted with
sawdust dry very quickly and usually very slowly when finished in papier
mache.

PREPARING AND MOUNTING A SMALL LIZARD

(Apply the wrapped body principle, given herewith, to mounting
small snakes, using a wire through center.)

A horned toad is a good example for us to work out in this dep