The Glory Hole 171 



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 in wliich is a label saying, "This vial con- 

 tains 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, so far as I could 

 see, there was no Glory Hole was the museum in Charles- 

 ton, 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 were willing to 

 throw things away even when they became museum cura- 

 tors, while the penny-pinching men of the New England 

 states fairly reveled in the making of Glory Holes. Cer- 

 tainly nothing equaling the collections of zoological atroci- 

 ties 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 squidlike 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 



