8 MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY 



in excellent condition. Among these are many careful dissections of the 

 nervous centres and the organs of sense, and a series of embryological speci- 

 mens which cannot fail to arrest the most careless observer. There are the 

 Surinam toads with their ova on their backs, like potatoes in their hills; 

 there are the strange fishes with their mouths full of eggs; there is the infant 

 skate with a broad laugh on his face as if he thought it a good joke to have 

 been hatched, and forthwith drowned in proof-spirit, like Clarence in his 

 butt of malmsey. Then come monstrosities of various kind and degree, 

 wonders and nothing more to the vulgar, keys to some of nature's deepest 

 secrets to the man of science. We pass next to the nests of wasps and hornets, 

 and the combs of bees, with casts of the cells, from some of which, it may be 

 mentioned, Professor Wyman took impressions directly upon paper, thus 

 insuring that accuracy for which he was almost unrivalled. The nests of the 

 great ants will next attract the eyes of the curious, and near these, the won- 

 derful carpentry of the beavers, as shown in the sticks they have cut into 

 lengths as if with tools of human workmanship. The great chissels of the 

 rodents, those enamel-faced incisors which are so contrived as to keep their 

 sharp bevel by the mere wear of use, grin in the crania ranged in rows above. 

 And so we might go on through almost innumerable specimens filling the 

 shelves, not with the rubbish of cheap collections, but with objects each of 

 which has an idea behind it, and each important series of which has been 

 illustrated by a paper well known to the scientific world. 



Later Professor Louis Agassiz segregated the zoological material, 

 and the subsequent history of the zoological museum as apart from 

 geology, mineralogy, archaeology and ethnology is told in the chapter 

 next following this one. So much for the beginnings of the Museum. 



Benjamin Waterhouse was made Hersey Professor of the Theory 

 and Practice of Physic in 1 783, having taken his Doctor's degree at 

 Leyden in 1780. He died in 181 2, but as long as he lived he con- 

 tinued to interest himself considerably in mineralogy as well as other 

 topics, but it was not until much later that the collections in geology 

 and mineralogy, and the teaching and research in these fields, be- 

 came really significant. 



This was not by any means true in the biological sciences. Pro- 

 fessor William Dandridge Peck (i 763-1822), who became Massa- 

 chusetts Professor of Natural History in 1805, was a versatile genius, 

 unfortunately and rather shamefully forgotten. He was not only an 

 accomplished botanist but was an entomologist of real distinction, 

 and some of his papers on economic entomology, published in the 

 Proceedings of the American Academy in Boston as far back as i 796, 

 would be well worthy of publication today in the same Proceedings 



