Naturalist at Large: The Glory Hole

by THOMAS BARBOUR

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THE man in the street has always been inclined to look down his nose at museum curators, and for as long as I have been one of them I have been pondering the reason. I think I have it. The average man doesn’t like a miser and, one way or another, the curator cannot help appearing miserly. When I first took charge of a certain museum, I found one big glass jar filled with chicken heads, another with burned matches, another with old rubbers. The chicken heads were potential material for dissection, and the fact that a dollar’s worth of heads filled a twenty-dollar jar never occurred to the man who ate those chickens, who was no other than Louis Agassiz himself.

The museum of which I speak at one time housed an unbelievable number of strange odds and ends accumulated through the years and saved because the old-time museum man thought it was a sin to throw anything out. I have been accused of erring in this manner myself. It is true that if you look at a thing long enough you lose perspective. Any object, no matter how revolting and loathsome, seen sufficiently often, blunts the senses, and one becomes disinclined to the effort necessary to get rid of it.

Pride of possession is a curious attribute of mankind. This was brought sharply to my mind yesterday when it occurred to me to ask myself, “Why didn’t Mrs. Chase give her gallstones to the Peabody Museum?” Many other people had, for there were a pint or more of miscellaneous gallstones in the Peabody Museum in Salem, curiously enough in the case with an old reindeer. But these were donated gallstones; it was only Mrs. Chase’s that were on loan. The answer is, Mrs. Chase’s gallstones were larger than any others in the whole place and she obviously just couldn’t bear to part with them permanently. I bethought me, Has this situation ever occurred before? And then I remembered that not long ago I was reading the last Annual Report of the Curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. This venerable institution, containing much material that was priceless indeed, suffered a direct hit from a German bomb. It was almost completely destroyed, and the story of the catastrophe was told, sadly and meticulously, by its distinguished curator. But if our friend in the street were to read this report he might be inclined to laugh heretically: along with many terrific losses were listed the facts that the jar containing Napoleon’s bowels was cracked and that the rib of Robert the Bruce was broken.

Director of the Agassiz Museum in Cambridge and a graduate of Harvard in 1906, DR. THOMAS BARBOUR is a scientist whose knowledge of reptiles, birds, and insects is rivaled only by his delight in human nature. This is the first of a zestful series of papers drawn from his reminiscences, which will hold the fruition of his forty years’ experience as a naturalist and traveler.

I have found myself justifying the preservation of objects which were inherently unpleasing to the eye by saying, “That illustrates the taxidermy of a hundred years ago.” Or the preservation of a codfish pickled in alcohol by saying, “Someone may want to dissect that fish sometime,” forgetting that fresh cod, infinitely preferable for dissection, are plentiful in the Boston area. And so it goes. The more I think of it, the more I believe that the average man is entirely entitled to his opinion and the average curator is a queer fish.

Now granted that the curator is a queer fish, is he a rare fish? I fear me the answer today is nay. My friend Alexander Wetmore, Director of the United States National Museum, in an address at the opening of the Dyche Museum at the University of Kansas, remarks, “There are today throughout the world more than seven thousand museums, of which more than a thousand are in the United States.” Every museum has at least one curator, and the breed came into being, no doubt, back in the days when the “Repositerry of Curiosity,” the Anlage of our University Museum here at Harvard, was visited by Francis Goelet on the twenty-fifth of October, 1750. Unfortunately, Mr. Goelet does not tell us how old the museum was at that date. He does, however, tell us its treasures included “horns and bones, fishes’ skins and other objects, and a piece of tanned Negro hide.” ¹

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Professor John Winthrop, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, evidently had started even at this early date to make what we call a “Glory Hole.” I have had some interesting experiences cleaning out “Glory Holes” in Cambridge, Boston, and Salem. Only the other day I opened a parcel in Salem, the wrapping paper of which was superscribed, “Please do not disturb these shells. Caleb Cooke, February 1857.” This behest had been scrupulously obeyed for eighty-five years and six months. The parcel proved to be pure gold, for the shells were collected from one of our New England rivers in which today it would be impossible to collect a single living thing, so polluted have its waters become. I hold in my hand a little vial on which is a label saying, “This vial contains two feathers of a large penguin.” One wonders why these two feathers out of the tens of thousands which that penguin carried were singled out for preservation.

The only old museum I ever saw where there was no Glory Hole was the museum in Charleston, South Carolina. This venerable institution, founded in 1773, has had plenty of time to accumulate one, but the gay and carefree cavaliers of the South must have been willing to throw things away even when they became curators, while the pennypinching men of the New England states fairly reveled in the making of Glory Holes. Certainly nothing equaling the collections of zoological atrocities once preserved in Boston, Salem, and Cambridge has ever been known in America, and probably but seldom in Europe. I remember one of my colleagues, now passed to his reward, pointing regularly to a certain cask and saying, “That’s filled with the pickled heads of Chinese.” Well, it was. They were garnered on the beach at San Francisco years ago after a battle, by Thomas G. Carey, no less. Now after some seventy years these heads, boiled out and the skulls bleached and cleaned, serve a useful purpose: Hooton of Harvard uses them in teaching physical anthropology.

Alexander Agassiz collected but one living spirula, a little squid-like mollusk whose dried shells may be found along the beaches of the tropics in countless thousands. The living spirula carried an important message, for its shell was like certain fossil shells of ages ago and gave us a clew to what the soft parts of those fossil animals were like. That spirula disappeared about forty-five years ago from the very desk at which I now sit writing these lines, and it has never been seen from that day to this.

Mr. Agassiz always said Professor E. D. Cope was unquestionably the greatest thief in the world, for the reason that he stole the largest object ever stolen. The story ran something like this: Captain Atwood of Provincetown, who did the Museum many good turns, once notified Mr. Agassiz that a strange whale had drifted ashore on the Outer Cape. Mr. Agassiz asked J. A. Allen and some students to go down and rough out the skeleton. This they did, and laid out the partially cleaned bones on a flatcar. They little dreamed that Dr. Cope from Philadelphia also had a scout on the Outer Cape, and Cope was a canny man. He went to Provincetown, hired a room in a farmhouse, where he could watch proceedings, and waited until the Cambridge crew went home. Then he greased the palm of the station agent to the end that a Philadelphia waybill instead of a Cambridge waybill was affixed to the flatcar and the whale ended up as the type of a new species which Mr. Cope described, its skeleton still being preserved at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. So the story runs, and I have often heard it told in the past.

I can hear the reader mildly say, “Why on earth does anyone want to be a museum curator?” This question, however, I can answer bravely and with positive assurance. To one who has by inheritance or training acquired the pack-rat instinct it is the most exciting calling in the whole world. For who, having a spark of imagination, could fail to be thrilled to hold in his hand our specimen of Drepanis pacifica? This was the bird from which the feathers were taken to make the royal robe of Kamehameha the Great. The bird is extinct. Our specimen was collected by Bloxam, who sailed on the Golden Hind with Captain Cook. It is, moreover, the cotype of the species. Any naturalist will know what I mean.

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This is how I came to think up a new kind of museum. The trustees of the Peabody Museum in Salem voted to restore East India Hall to its original monumental simplicity and to display here figureheads of ships and other objects that are best seen from a distance. The Hall for years has been filled with a jittery miscellany of zoological objects. There was a good representation of the fauna of Essex County, specimens excellently prepared. All else was a miscellaneous accumulation, acquired through the years from sea captains and others, of specimens which varied in quality from the utterly revolting to a few really fine things. It was easy to dispose of the repulsive material. Some of it had scientific value and the rest of it, when tossed out of a second-story window into the back yard on Charter Street in Salem, was fought for by a swarm of urchins, who carried the critters off in triumph. The police, at first unbelieving and suspecting theft, soon became acquiescent.

The question was what to do with the few good things which did not illustrate the zoology of Essex County. These naturally presented a dilemma. I proposed discarding them all. Then one day I chanced to lunch with Gus Loring and Stephen W. Phillips, men of original mind and deep learning, who had a sentimental respect for some of the objects I proposed to discard. It was quite obvious that I could not proceed without seriously wounding feelings. I suddenly thought, “See if we can’t make a human interest story out of each one; display the object with its relation to man.” A sort of rough classification gradually grew on me. There was a good skylark and a good wandering albatross. Get a nightingale and set up a display. Label it “These birds have inspired great poetry.” Else pictures of the poets, facsimiles of the poems, and some of the most superb verses in boldly typed labels.

What do domesticated animals teach us beside carving at table? Domestic fowl and the pigeon have been extraordinarily plastic in man’s hands. Think of the contrast between a Shanghai rooster and a Seabriglit bantam. The Shanghai and the Langshan are the largest of the so-called Asiatic breeds of fowl, enormous creatures standing over two feet high. The breeds are now out of fashion and almost extinct. Luckily the Museum had some really historic fowls. Here was the rooster brought back over a hundred years ago, the progenitor of the stock which gave rise to the Rhode Island Red. And I found a wild jungle fowl which could be spared from the collections in Cambridge. With the help of the Essex County Agricultural School, I soon had plans for this exhibit under way.

Various species of jungle fowl, which look exactly like small game chickens, are found all over Southeastern Asia. When you are living in the country where they occur, you seldom see them, but their crowing at morning and evening sometimes becomes a positive nuisance. Now, conversely, although there is no reason to believe that the Aztecs did not hold the turkey in domestication for as long a time as any of the peoples of Asia had the fowl, the turkey has not proved plastic at all. Cortez sent domesticated birds which he found in Mexico back to Europe. From there they spread all over the world. They came to New England, and to this day domesticated turkeys, most of them, are hard to tell from wild birds. A few varieties have been produced, but only by the chance dropping out of elements of the normal pigmentation of the bird’s plumage. In the reddish-colored turkeys, the black or the dilute black pigment — the gray — has gone and the red element alone remains. In the white turkeys all pigmentation has disappeared; albino races are always easy to produce in domestication. White rats and mice and guinea pigs come to mind, as well as leghorn fowl and fantail pigeons,

I visualized an exhibit around William Endicott’s magnificent bull bison, not using the animal as a zoological object, a member of the Bovidae, but as a creature which provided food, shelter, sport, and even an object of worship to many tribes of Indians. And here illustrative material is abundant and spectacular.

The Museum had a first-class ostrich, given it some years ago by Mrs. Stephen W. Phillips — an ostrich far too good to throw away. By good fortune, I had a sample of dried ostrich meat, one of the various kinds of biltong carried by the Boers as rations when at war or on trek. An ostrich feather fan, an old-time bonnet, and headdresses of the Nandi Masai all proved obtainable.

Think what a story you can build about the giant tortoise of the Galapagos. The old whalers called them turpin. For generations all the ships that chanced to be near the Galapagos Islands, about six hundred miles southwestward of Panama, went ashore turtling. The crews carried the beasts down to the beach, boated them to the ships, and piled them up in their empty holds. Here, being the strange creatures that they are, they survived for months without food or water. When scurvy appeared the turtles were butchered. The flesh was savory even when poorly prepared. There was enough fat in each one to shorten a mess of duff, and the water in their bladders was cool and clear. I have seen a compilation made from about thirty whalers’ logs which shows tnat they carried off more than eleven thousand of these animals. Once they occurred in countless multitudes on no fewer than nine of the islands. Seventeen zoological species of turtles have been described. But this is not the point which we want the magnificent specimen at Salem to illustrate — rather, what turtles like this meant to seamen from the time of Dampier down to about 1867, when petroleum knocked out whale oil. Probably no fewer than half a million turpin were carried away, and now all the races of the creatures are rare or extinct.

Captain Phillips brought back from Fiji an enormous giant clam. The superb pair of matched valves are at least three feet long and weigh over a hundred pounds each. But I don’t want this to be a malacological specimen. It was the terror of the pearl diver. For if a diver inadvertently thrust a hand or a foot into one of these gaping shells as it yawned open, the instant reaction was for the animal to close up, like any other clam, and the death of the diver ensued.

These giant clams were undoubtedly eaten, the meat being chopped fine and stewed. No doubt it was as good as conch, most delectable of all sea viands, unfortunately unprocurable in New England. What a dramatic underwater scene could be depicted with modern methods of creating illusions. Mold a lovely Polynesian maiden vested only with a net reticule of pearl shells tied to her waist and struggling for release from the clutch of this giant mollusk. I fear, however, that such pageantry is beyond our means — and might shock Salem, anyhow.

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It is probable that all the various races of domestic duck are derived from the wild mallard, and where man first began to breed ducks for food is doubtful. It was probably in China. Anyone who has traveled into the interior of China, say up the Si-kiang River from Canton to Wuchow, will recall the floating duck farms. These great arks built on rafts move about from place to place, a gangplank is let down, and the ducks scut lie overboard and dip and dive and feed. At evening the proprietor of the establishment stands by with a bamboo wand and beats a gong and the ducks rush up the gangway, for they know from bitter experience that the last few ducks will be assiduously whacked with the bamboo just for being last.

The people in Bali have had the duck for years. The characteristic race is a white one with a large fluffy topknot, and the Balinese positively assure us that unless a bunch of cotton wool on top of a twig is put before the setting duck where she must observe it constantly, the young will not be bedecked with the much admired pompom of feathers on their heads. And though unquestionably man has played with the duck for a long time, no such enormous variety of named races has been produced as in the case of the fowl. The Muscovy duck is far distantly related to all the rest of its kin. This bird is found in a wild state through the tropical lowlands of Central and South America. By this I mean, of course, the forested areas. It was domesticated in Mexico, and possibly by other Indian tribes than the Aztecs. Brought to Europe, the tradition of its origin was apparently lost, but just why it should have been considered to be of Muscovite origin I can’t remember, although I have been told. Except for albino and pied individuals, most of the Muscovy ducks are essentially the same as their wild ancestors. This is also true of the guinea hens which came to America on the slave ships from West Africa. As everybody knows, these can hardly be called domesticated. They have a tendency to run wild, and indeed in many localities in Haiti and Cuba they afford good sport with a shotgun, being strong, fast flyers.

Look at the pigeons on Boston Common and you will be struck by the fact that the vast majority of them are essentially like the blue rock dove, which is their wild ancestor. Man has produced an extraordinary number of bizarre and curious types of pigeon, but let them become feral, as they have in Boston or Venice, and they revert to the ancestral type, at least in a vast majority of cases. And the accidental additions which come from escaped fancy pigeons are soon bred out and absorbed into the essentially blue rock mass of the population.

But I don’t want to crowd our museum at Salem to where it appears to overstress the exhibition of domesticated animals. This aspect has been treated elsewhere. There is a wonderful collection of all sorts of domesticated types at the British Museum of Natural History in London, of dogs at Yale, and a fair synoptic collection in Cambridge.

A good many dyed plumes of birds of paradise seized in the Custom House and turned over to the Peabody Museum for exhibition remind us of the trade in birds of paradise. When the Dutch and Portuguese first arrived in the Moluccas, they found some of the Malay sultans receiving dried skins of birds of paradise as tribute from Papuan tribes of savages who owed them suzerainty. These skins were legless, and the notion grew that the birds spent their lives flying in the air and admiring the sun. During the last years of the last century and the first decade of this the number of birds of paradise which were garnered from the western part of New Guinea and the Aru Islands was stupendous. Queen Wilhelmina stopped the slaughter some years ago. But birds of paradise were still abundant, even considering the enormous numbers killed for trade, because the females were so inconspicuous and so utterly unlike the males that they were never disturbed, and all the species are highly polygamous.

And so, to my great surprise, I find myself at last engaged in building up an entirely new type of museum. There will be many objects displayed beside the ones which I have indicated. I believe that with thoughtful labeling some zoology, some history, some folklore, and some poetry may be taught in a very attractive way. And I wish we could find a good name for our innovation. I can think only of “Museum of Etlinozoology,” which sounds utterly loathsome.