SpringSigns of the season, from diverseSampler University collections

Here begins an excursion through Harvard collections in independent look. Only the pi- search of evidence of the vernal equinox. The first sign is found geons still ask openly for bread.… in the collected pages of this magazine. “Cambridge Spring,” by “Overnight the forsythia the late Primus I, a.k.a. David McCord ’21, L.H.D. ’56, appeared in turned yellow and flowered; and “The College Pump” in the issue of April 26, 1941. War loomed, tomorrow it will shed. The Japanese crabapple has issued its but the birds and the bees knew nothing of that. ultimatum. The leaves of the lilacs are an inch long.…At the “As quick as you can say ‘Littauer Center’ the buds on local moment a large bee doing figure eights has steered his way bushes in the Yard uncurled last week, and a man with a spading- to our quarter of the Yard, and his little music—if we could fork got himself into di∞cult areas behind the shrubbery and set to hear it—would be enough to make us put the period here work on the good earth. Cambridge spring is a fleeting and only where we shall drop a colon: Do you remember Cambridge half-expected miracle. A day of comforting warmth, a touch of the spring? The young gentleman across the way at his window south wind, and there it is, whether we deserve it or not. This year it in Grays, his white shirt very laundered in the sun, is reading. has come earlier than in the memory of living man—so we may He is probably reading sociology, oblivious of the bee, the for- speak of it. The little band of English sparrows that behaved to us so sythia, the Japanese crabapple, and the fact that he will soon pleasantly all winter, reporting daily to the uno∞cial feeding station be older and remembering in turn. Sociology? It is doubtful if under a secluded Wadsworth House window, have taken them- he knows that three black-crowned night herons selves o≠ in search of new eaves and cornices. Their manner as yet is flew over Cambridge last evening noisy but not arrogant. Squirrels have an uncombed, late-rising, but heading north.”

An instrument to mea- sure spring with. Plung- ing into the basement of the Science Center, we find the Collection of Historical Scientific In- struments. Among its treasures is an ivory pocket sundial (its gno- mon missing) made in 1613 in Nuremberg, Ger- many, by Lienhart Miller, For a grittier take that enables the user to on spring, we head our- know precisely when selves to Houghton Li- spring arrives and exult brary, the College’s store- accordingly. When the house of rare books and shadow of the sun fol- manuscripts, and to the lows the horizontal line papers of Cambridge- near the top of the upright, raised, Harvard-educated, that day is the equinox. The poet e.e. cummings ’15. dial was designed also to predict The typescript of cum- the weather—impending April show- mings’s “voices to voices, ers, for instance—and provide quantities lip to lip” contains this of information about far-flung places useful

mention of the season. for folk longing to go on pilgrimages. E.E CUMMINGS: BMS AM 1823.5 (392). HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY SUN DIAL: COURTESY HARVARD UNIVERSITY COLLECTION OF HISTORICAL SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS

38 March - April 2002 Photographs by Jim Harrison unless otherwise indicated

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For copyright and reprint information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at www.harvardmagazine.com A familiar spring chorister in the East in woods near water is Pseudacris crucifer crucifer, a tree frog. Although only three- quarters of an inch to an inch and a half in length, the peeper emits a high-pitched whistle with an occasional trill that carries far. A glee club of spring peepers heard from a dis- tance can sound like sleigh bells. The distinguishing feature of the species is the rough “X” on its back. The drawing is from “Notes on the Peeping Frog,” by Mary H. Hinckley, in Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History (1884) at the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The magnificent frigate bird normally breeds in the tropics of the New World, but this one has alluringly inflated its throat sac like a Valentine at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Amorous frigate birds may be spotted off the coasts of Florida, the Gulf states, and southern California. They sel- dom alight except to nest.

The fossil fly shown here, actually tiny, is an ex- tinct species of the modern genus Plecia, the love bug. This individual lost interest in romance some 50 million years ago. “It dates from what might be called the spring- time of spring,” says Brian Farrell, professor of biology and curator in entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, “the time when the world’s climate was much less seasonal than today.” A species of the fly’s descendants blackens the highways of Florida in spring in mating swarms of zillions of individuals. “Many love bugs meet their Maker,” Farrell notes, “when they slam into the wind-

BRUCE ARCHIBALD shields of cars at 50 miles an hour, in copula.”

Objects © President and Fellows of Harvard College Harvard Magazine 39

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For copyright and reprint information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at www.harvardmagazine.com Hopi mudheads are spirit beings. The best-known of them is Tat- siqtö, represented here in a five-and-a-half-inch high Hopi doll made in Arizona, probably in 1937, of painted wood, yarn, and feathers, and now resident at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Sev- eral hundred spirit beings, katsinam, once visited the Hopi in person, but now they come as clouds for part of each year, and costumed Hopi men assume their powers in ceremonies and dances. Katsina dolls are given to infants as teaching aids. Mudheads, made of mud, symbolize the matrix where humans origi- nated. In the knobs on their heads, they carry seeds and soil collected from human footprints. As the Hopi begin to plant their gardens in April, mudheads are among the all-important rainmakers from the gods (see the on-line exhibition of that name at www.peabody.har- vard.edu/katsina). Remember e.e. cummings’s “in Just-”, also at Houghton: “in Just-spring when the world is mud-luscious…when the

HILLEL BURGER/PEABODY MUSEUM world is puddle-wonderful.…” CAMBRIDGE 1960. MS TYP 894, DEPARTMENT OF

The venerable bede asserted in the eighth century that Easter was named after Eostre, a Saxon goddess of fertility A BESTIARY, whose festival was celebrated on the vernal equinox. Other scholars have implicated the Norse goddess Ostara, whose MARIE ANGEL, PRINTING AND GRAPHIC ARTS, HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY symbols were the hare and the egg. Today, the Easter Bunny visits with a basket of eggs, promising fecundity and regenera- tion, and then it’s time for a parade in one’s new bonnet. Here, from the Theatre Collection, are the proudest couple, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, in a still from the 1948 movie Easter

Parade. The rabbits gamboling : HARVARD THEATRE through the initials “F.L.H.”— for Frances L. Hofer, for whom

Courtship, abduction, sacrifice—Igor Stravinsky’s The artist Marie Angel did her 1960 EASTER PARADE

Rite of Spring has it all as Slavonic elders watch a maiden dance painting on vellum—are in the AND herself to death to appease the god of spring. The Harvard care of the Department of Theatre Collection houses this watercolor costume design by Printing and Graphic Arts, Nikola˘l Konstantinovich Rerikh showing two foot-stomping Houghton Library.

clowns in the 1913 premiere in Paris by the Ballets Russes. THE RITE OF SPRING COLLECTION, HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

40 March - April 2002

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For copyright and reprint information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at www.harvardmagazine.com The polychrome nosegay on this Turk- ish dish of the late sixteenth century is jolly looking but may be a lover’s lament. In Ottoman poetry, the cypress tree, center, often sym- bolizes the tresses of the beloved, the carnation means the beloved is aloof, and the tulip stands for unrequited passion. The dish and its messages, about a foot in diameter and crafted in Iznik, an- cient Nicaea, east of the Sea of Marmara, speak now at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

This once- buzzing bee did its business with these flowers (an ex- tinct relative of hibis- cus) about 53 million years ago. Now an object of scholarly interest at the Mu- seum of Comparative Zoology, it is the second oldest fossil bee body in captivity, according to Bruce Archibald, doctoral candidate in entomology, who is at work with a colleague on a paper describing and naming the species based on this type specimen. (The oldest bee body, from Late Cretaceous amber of New Jersey, is perhaps 15 million years older and “isn’t as cute,” says Archibald.) BRUCE ARCHIBALD COURTESY OF THE ARTHUR M. SACKLER MUSEUM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS, GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. PHILIP HOFER/RICK STAFFORD

An unknown chinese master captured this pristine tree-peony blossom in ink and colors on silk during the Southern Song period, 1127-1279. From the Sackler Museum.

Harvard Magazine 41

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For copyright and reprint information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at www.harvardmagazine.com This burst of apple blossom is glass. It is one of 4,400 models com- prising the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, the University’s most-visited tourist attraction, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The famous glass flowers are fragile and elderly, and a conservation e≠ort is planned. The first 1,000 models, including this one, have been taken from their cases and await the development of a conservation lab and conservation team to undertake an esti- mated 15,000 hours of treatment. GLASS APPLE BLOSSOMS: COURTESY HARVARD UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Spring training. Even Red Sox fans get hopeful in the spring. When this shot from the University Archives was made of the Harvard squad taking bat- ting practice in the spring of 1898 (the year this mag- azine was founded), spir- its no doubt ran high, and at season’s end the team had won 21 games, tied 1, and lost only 10. (Never mind that they lost two of

HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES three games with Yale.) COURTESY OF THE ARTHUR M. SACKLER MUSEUM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS, BEQUEST OF FREDERICK M. WATKINS

Why spring happens. When Hades snatched the maiden Persephone from a flower-strewn meadow and carried her down to the underworld to be his wife, her mother, Demeter, goddess of agricul- ture, heard her daughter’s screams and raced to help her, but in vain. Demeter wandered the earth, mourning greatly. She caused a vast barrenness to fall upon the land. Flowers withered, grain died. A delegation of gods urged Demeter to relent and come to Mount Olympus, but she remained on earth, inconsolable. At last Zeus saw that he himself must intervene and dispatched Hermes to the underworld with in- structions. Hades knew he could not re- sist and relinquished Persephone, but he persuaded her first to eat a few pomegran- ate seeds, which obliged her to return to him. Hades has Persephone for four months of each year and then releases her topside. Spring accompanies her return. Persephone appears on the obverse of this Sackler Museum silver coin, struck at Pheneos, in Arcadia, Greece, circa 362 b.c. to 300 b.c.

42 March - April 2002

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For copyright and reprint information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at www.harvardmagazine.com Fictional detective Nero Wolf recognized spring by consuming quan- tities of shad roe, prepared by Fritz the chef with a sauce of fresh sorrel in cream. The American shad, a member of the herring family, is an anadro- mous species: it leaves its o≠shore salty habitat in spring to swim up its natal fresh-water river to spawn. In southern rivers, it dies after spawning; north of the Carolinas, increasingly it survives, until in Maine 75 percent of spawners return to the sea. Shad reach the Charles River (albeit now only a few thousand of them, though the Merrimack River has an excellent run) in May, just as the Amelanchier arborea, or shadbush, unfurls its pendu- lous racemes of small, white flowers in joy at their return. The American shad averages three to five pounds, and a female may carry 125,000 to 525,000 eggs. The flesh of the fish is edible, certainly, but boney. This drawing of Alosa sapidissima, at the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, is from First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York (1896), where it accompanies a survey of shad in the Hudson.

Spring cleaning gets going with Pearline Washing Compound, as seen on “My Busy Day,” an 1892 advertis- ing trade card from the His- torical Collections of the Baker Library, Harvard Busi- ness School. ADVERTISING EPHEMERA, BAKER LIBRARY, HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

Coming soon. “Blossoms,” by the British artist Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893), emerges from the dark vaults of the Fogg Art Museum to bring this celebration to a rapturous but refined conclusion.

“Spring Sampler” conceived by Christopher Reed, executive editor, and Harvard Magazine 43 executed by Jennifer Carling, art director. COURTESY OF THE FOGG ART MUSEUM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY MUSEUMS, BEQUEST GRENVILLE L. WINTHROP/KATYA KALLIEN Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For copyright and reprint information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at www.harvardmagazine.com