Impressions from a Recent Visit to Mount Holyoke College. How would you like to study Biology in a laundry or a bake-shop? That's what Mount Holyoke students have been doing since the destruction of the biological laboratories in Williston Hall.
Two years ago Mount Holyoke woke up one morning to find her beautiful bird collection gone up in smoke, her shells collected by missionary pioneers from the isles of all the seas, a heap of smouldering ashes, and gone were her butterflies and pickled cats, her earthworms and her mastodons, her microscopes and microtomes.
But fires always seem to stimulate Mount Holyoke girls. And when the trustees turned over to the biologists a long low rambling structure designed to be a laundry, bakery and general service building, they promptly put over the door the optimistic legend "Temporary Science Building", with the emphasis upon the "temporary".
But how, you ask, can one teach Biological Science without specimens, without models and charts and expensive apparatus? In this day of the movies and visual instruction, it's like Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Just go to South Hadley. You'll find that a little thing like that doesn't phase Mount Holyoke. Models needed? A few weeks spent by one of the instructors at the American Museum, and presto! the girls are learning to make their own models. Beautiful habitat groups of wax frogs and toads, turtles and sea anemones appear like magic in the vacant cases all so naturally colored as to deceive their own relatives.
Are mounted skeletons in demand? The comparative anatomy class "gets busy" and the death rate among South Hadley pussies shows a sudden marked increase. The embryology class, not to be outdone, painstakingly mounts a most remarkable series of chick embryos where future students may gaze upon "the little red hen" from the time she appears as a mere "primitive streak" till she emerges from the shell a properly feathered chicken, everything preserved except the "peep".
Not content with these achievements they decided to try their hand on pigs. Down to the slaughter house they went where they pursuaded [sic] a good-natured attendant into saving for them "piglets" in all stages. And behold! aforesaid "piglets" may now be seen reposing in neatly labelled jars, most useful material for future nurses and doctors.
But chicks and pigs and skeletons need homes and how can one pack students and specimens, laboratory apparatus and microscopes in a laundry and a bake-shop? To be sure it may be appropriate for students of Pasteur to be next door neighbors to the college pasteurizing plant but it's rather crowded.
So Mount Holyoke hopes and prays that some generous friend will remove the "temporary" from the Biology Building in order that a new permanent laboratory may arise from the ashes of the old.
M. Helen Smith
Teacher of Biology,
Brooklyn, N.Y.