William Warmus Inc

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Ocean Realm magazine: The Blaschka Octopus at Cornell University Summer 2001 cover photograph by William Warmus More Than Art: The Blaschka Marine Invertebrates by William Warmus For a catalog of the species names of the Cornell Blaschka collection, go here: Cornell Blaschka catalog Notes: The published version of this essay appeared in Glass magazine, Summer 2001. This web version is illustrated with the author's photographs of the Cornell University collection of Blaschka Marine Invertebrate glass models. A second article was published in Ocean Realm magazine (above). See www.oceanrealm.net . For additional Blaschka resources, go here: Blaschka webography Thanks to Professor Drew Harvell, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, who is in charge of the Blaschka collection, for her advice and support. The images on this page are by William Warmus, made mostly with a Minolta Dimage 7 digital camera. Backgrounds adjusted with Photoshop. In 1928 the naturalist William Beebe described his experiences as a helmet diver in the book Beneath Tropic Seas. Beebe felt that our existing terrestrial vocabulary was an inexact and at times unimaginative instrument for gauging the world beneath the waves. For example, he wrote: "I know the exact shade of a certain feathery sea plume, but resent having to refer to it as zinc orange. Yet I am always pleased when I detect salmon, or pearl-grey or ultramarine." Beebe struggled to present an accurate and poetic account of the fantastic visions presented to him by the ocean realm, but he was not the first. From ancient times to today, scientists, writers and artists have sought to perfect their descriptions of the deep and the creatures that thrive there. The Blaschkas, who made the glass creatures that illustrate this essay, were not the first to make models of underwater life, but they were among the most fanatic in attention to detail. They would have appreciated Beebe's subtlety of observation. The Discovery During the fall of 1957 an unusual find was made at Cornell University in upstate New York. Professor Thomas Eisner, a young faculty member who was working in Roberts Hall and had begun to explore its musty corridors, found a series of locked antique wooden cabinets. Through the dingy glass windows were visible hundreds of delicate and unusual sea creatures, all the more extraordinary because landlocked Ithaca is several hundred miles away from the closest tide pools. Eisner, now recognized as a founder of the field of chemical ecology, and his graduate student Roger Payne, who later discovered that Humpback whales sing songs [endnote 1], picked the locks with a paper clip and were absolutely mesmerized to find that the highly detailed ocean invertebrates, including octopus, squid, pelagic snail, and sea cucumber, were made of glass. Altogether, 570 creatures had been-well, how had they been?-fashioned by someone, for some purpose. But why? And when? The story begins in the fall of 1882. The president of Cornell, A. D.

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