THE BIRDS AT SOUTH KENSINGTON. South Kensington has of late years been so inseparably identified with Art, that it will seem natural to the readers of this article for Art to form its subject; but it will probably surprise the frequenters of these buildings to be asked to bend their steps towards the Natural History Department—which one naturally supposes devoted to scientific objects—to examine works of art quite equal in their way to any to be found in the building devoted ostensibly to that purpose. Many must have been struck by the artistic and natural grouping of the birds, with their nests and young, in imitation of the surroundings they frequent while living. How much more one is impressed with the beauty of the creatures, when one sees them arranged in the positions they assume in a state of nature, than when placed in the old-fashioned style, mounted on boards or badly imitated stumps of trees! Justly, this admirable grouping calls forth exclamations of delight from the beholder; yet there is a fact connected with this artistic grouping that is as well worthy of the admiration of the visitor as the scientific facts here intended to be represented. The surrounding of each of these nests is a work of art in itself, constructed, with the most painstaking regard to accuracy of detail, by a lady, whose name, though not appearing in this _connection_, is not unknown to fame. The sods—if the bird be a ground-builder—are dug up with the nest and surroundings as they are found, and are submitted at once for the modeller to copy the various weeds and flowers exactly as they grow. The sods are then dried and cleaned, and the modeller fixes into them the flowers and weeds she has constructed, and paints up the grass, to restore it to its original colour. They are then deposited in the places they are destined to occupy in the Museum. The material employed for making these artificial flowers and weeds has been called by the inventor, who is also the modeller, the ‘New Kensington Art Material.’ Boughs of trees, the minutest flowers and weeds, even the hair-like filaments that many flower-stems possess as a protection against the ravages of insects, are copied with such scrupulous accuracy as to defy detection by ordinary means; and the union between the real wood and its artificial representation is concealed with the same regard to reality. The secret of the manufacture of the material is strictly preserved.