A View from Planet Earth

Abstract

One fine spring day not long ago, in a fit of restlessness, I walked the few blocks from my office to the red brick buildings of the Harvard University Museum. For several hours I ambled through a maze of corridors and halls crammed with specimens, the bounty of a century of collecting zeal. Stuffed animals, large and small, faced me in orderly phalanxes; bones and rocks filled case after case. In one hall, a collection of crystals and gems sparkled under fluorescent lights. In another, a fossil armadillo the size of a Volkswagen loomed against a painted landscape. Tucked away in a small glass case in one room was a plaster replica of the skeleton of “Lucy,” childlike in size, yet an adult hominid, one of humankind’s earliest known ancestors.