Special Collections & Archives

By Robert Young, Special Collections Librarian Best known as the Hassler Expedition’s young zoological artist from Provincetown, Blake entered business in early life with his stepfather before deciding to enroll at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in...

By Robert Young, Special Collections Librarian On 29 January 1855, Andrew Garrett, a thirty-one-year-old self-trained naturalist living in Hilo, Hawaii, wrote a letter to Louis Agassiz-- who was soliciting contributions of zoological specimens for Harvard...

Please join us for a pop-up exhibit* in the Special Collections at the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. History of Biology: Collecting, Classifying, Cells and Cats . Friday, October 25, 2019, 2:00-4:30pm Highlights of this...

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology...

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant. A 1907 journal entry finds Brewster weighing in on the ‘nature fakers’...

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant. This past weekend I went with a friend to visit October Farm, William Brewster...

This post is part of a series on the collection of ornithologist William Brewster (1851-1919) at the Ernst Mayr Library, written by Elizabeth Meyer, library project assistant. “The conditions which govern the singing of birds are a constant puzzle to me,”...

This spring I was an intern at the Ernst Mayr Library and Museum of Comparative Zoology Archives of Harvard University. I worked with Robert Young, the Special Collections Librarian/archivist. My project taught me how to compose a finding aid from scratch...

This post is also published on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog. As a part of the Field Notes Project, the Ernst Mayr Library is digitizing the journals, correspondences and photographs of William Brewster (1851-1919), a self-trained ornithologist...

Illustration on an American Long-eared Owl, from 'Birdcraft', New York: Macmillan Co., 1897. See volume on BHL. Modern scientists usually try to minimize their presence when studying wild animal behaviors, but William Brewster’s approach was often up...