The University's Attic

At least half the students in the University have never heard of its Museum. Most of the other half, if asked about it, would only mumble something about the glass flowers and point toward Malinckrodt, without knowing much else. Yet to half a million visitors annually, the Oxford Street monolith is Harvard.

For them, the forbidding exterior, the long dim lit halls, the closely packed display cases designed for study but not for showmanship-all fit the usual Harvard stereotype. Actually, there is not one museum but many, each with its own exhibition halls and staff. A few exhibits from a few these museums are shown on this page.

In the Museum of Comparative Zoology (top right) an undergraduate peers up at the skeleton of a 50-foot sperm whale, while a young resident of Boston (top left) looks with some uneasiness at the worldly remains of a gorilla. At the left are two Peruvian mummies photographed in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Below are samples of the ruins at Copan, Honduras-probably the best known example of Mayan culture at its palmiest.

At the right, below, a visitor enviously examines a case of cut precious stones in the Minerological Museum, and in the lower right corner, a model of a glant devilfish hangs over two museum-goers in the Comparative Zoology section.

Not all of the five-story building is given over to museum purposes. Much of the space is filled with the offices of professors in such fields as anthropology, botany, geology, and zoology. These officers, too reflect the general disarray of the ancient building which houses them. One such belongs to Marland P. Billings, professor of geology, shown working with two of this students.

One feature is conspicuously absent in this page of photographs: the glass flowers. Certainly they are the best-known aspect of the Museum. But also, they are one of the less vivid and appealing aspects. Down the hall, up stairs and downstairs from them lie the other museum. To the footweary they sometimes seem almost impossible, their halls are no long. To those looking for specific objects they may seem warehouses instead of display-places. Yet the causal onlooker can find there immense lore and satisfaction