On Friday afternoons, I generally poke around the archives and the stacks. Today, I was searching for something specific, which I didn’t find, to my chagrin.
But I did find an early copy of the Dictionary of Chemicals, published in 1771.
As I leafed through the book, something caught my eye, and so I flipped through, page by page, until I found it.
It was a petal, pressed between the pages. I tried to see if there was something specific on the page that would explain why the petal was there, but nothing caught my eye.
As I continued turning page, I found more and more petals, some making heart shapes on the pages.
I thought this was so enchanting, and wondered who had put the petals there, and why they were keeping them.
At the end of this volume, I found this wonderful table of chemical characters,
and this note to the book-binder.
I love discovering things like this.
Hello Meg, It's odd that the petals were individually preserved, as opposed to entire flowers. I wonder whether there was any scientific reason for their preservation.
ReplyDelete--Jim
Jim - I wonder if it's because the whole flower was too big to press... especially if it was a rose.
ReplyDelete