If you do not want to know the nuts and bolts (or rather, the knives and molds) of the craft of taxidermy, but you want to know about why people might be interested in such an activity, what happens to their exhibits in museums, how museums express cultural and scientific philosophy, and how we come to categorize the biology that fills our world, then Stephen T. Asma's _Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums_ (Oxford University Press) will do nicely. It is an amusing ramble through museums, but since Asma is a professor of philosophy, it veers through much larger ideas.
Asma obviously likes museums, and he has gained entrance to the back rooms denied to other mortals. He is delighted to report his findings, such as the dermestid beetle room at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These beetles, held in a stinky sealed room that has a door like a submarine hatch, swarm over the skinned bodies of specimens, literally gnawing them to the bone in a couple of days. He has interviewed curators and exhibition designers, and has them explain what they are trying to accomplish in their exhibits. But they may not know; how a display is arranged depends on scientific and social philosophy which varies from time to time and from nation to nation, and may be covert. Louis Agassiz displayed human racial artifacts at Harvard to emphasize that races were different, having been separately and specially created, rather than showing the continuity of human descent. The natural history museum in England have exhibits that emphasize Darwin, but the French hardly mention him. The Americans will have the most modern philosophy of taxonomy.
Comfortable with including Plato, James, Wittgenstein and others from his own field, Asma gives a wide-ranging discussion of epistemological issues that is academic but is never stuffy and never loses its sense of fun.
