Explorer Naturalists

T he famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once described writing as " a torture and a pastime " and contrasted it to " a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum " [1]. For six years before moving to Cornell University as a professor of Russian literature, Nabokov worked as a research fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he specialized in " blues " (Family Lycaenidae). The public face of this museum (as well as the Harvard University Herbaria and the Mineralogical and Geological Museum) is Harvard's Museum of Natural History, whose collection consists of more than 21 million specimens acquired over two centuries. In a fascinating new book, The Rarest of the Rare: Stories behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Nancy Pick describes highlights of this vast collection in a rarely found combination of seamless prose, outstanding photographs, history, legendary fi gures, and, of course, science. Choosing among 21 million specimens appears a daunting task, and stripped of their historical signifi cance, some of Pick's choices may seem, at fi rst glance, somewhat pedestrian. It is not until we read her description of the specimen of a common sand dollar, that we learn it was collected by Charles Darwin in 1834 during his journeys as a naturalist on the Beagle. Darwin sent the specimen to an echinoid specialist in Switzerland named Louis Agassiz, who later moved to Harvard and obtained funding for the Museum of Natural History, which opened in 1859. A contemporary of Agassiz at Harvard was the famous botanist Asa Gray, who, in contrast to Agassiz, was a strong believer in evolution. One of the items in the collection is an 1857 letter from Darwin to Gray (a photograph of the letter is shown in the book) describing his thoughts on natural selection, two years before The Origin of Species was published. Another specimen that's uninteresting until we know its provenance is a turtle that Harvard College graduate Henry David Thoreau sent to Agassiz in 1847. The turtle was collected in the Walden Pond of Thoreau's classic book. The birds of American history are well represented by a pair of pheasants that the Marquis de Lafayette sent to George Washington in 1786. The original home of these pheasants was in the fi rst scientifi c museum in the country, founded by the painter Charles …