Albert R. Mann Library

Illustration of Ophiogphagus hannah by Annada Prasad Bagchi (student), from Poisonous Snakes of India, by Joseph Ewart (London, 1878).

Are you as impressed as we are with the amazing 3D effect of this exquisite illustration?

This beauty was originally drawn by artist Annada Prasad Bagchi (or possibly one of his students?), for a part-medical, part-zoological study of India's venomous snakes titled The Thanatophidia of India, published in 1872 by physician and British colonial administrator Joseph Fayrer. We happened to find it in a later (by just a couple of years) publication in our special collections, this one by another physician, Joseph Stewart, also employed in the 19th century British colonial government of India, who used some of the earlier publication's illustrations to create Poisonous Snakes of India, a shorter, more handbook-like work intended to help guide clinical treatment of snake bites. King cobras have a wide native range in across South and Southeast Asia. Both feared for their venom and revered in regional myth and folklore they are the national reptile of India today, yet presently considered a vulnerable species by the IUCN due to habitat loss and hunting. Important to note: Cobras are much more likely to attempt a quick escape than attack when encountered by humans. Given this behavior and the protections currently in place in several countries, we like to think there's hope for this species yet.

Annada Prasad Bagchi was a well-recognized painter, lithographer, engraver, illustrator and teacher of art in late 19th-early 20th century Bengal. With others, he founded the Calcutta Art Studio in 1878, a creative center that produced popular book illustrations as well as portrait and landscape paintings as well as watercolors and lithographic prints for the commercial market, playing an important role in producing artwork for a mass clientele in early 20th century India. Bagchi himself also gained considerable fame as a portrait artist.

What we're not so very sure of in terms of this particular king cobra illustration is whether it was a work by Bagchi himself, or one of his students. If any of our readers have insight for us on that, please feel free to let us know! One way or the other, Bagchi's accomplishments and the nurtured talent revealed in this particular drawing clearly indicate an artist of significant impact. We are very glad to have found this work to make our contribution to #WorldSnakeDay today!

American horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus). Anonymous illustrator. From J. De Kay, Zoology of New-York, vol. 5, pt. 6. (Albany, NY, 1843).

On June 20 every year, these ancient beauties of our world get some well-deserved special attention. Those of us lucky enough to encounter a horseshoe crab on a summertime seashore walk are meeting a creature that is more closely related to spiders than true crabs and boasts a lineage stretching 200- to  450 million years back.  The American horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) lives in shallow waters of the continental shelf along the Atlantic coast of North America. In an annual spectacle that has repeated itself over eons, during the high tides of spring and summer, masses of horseshoe crabs enter intertidal areas along the shore to spawn—an event that ensures the species survival and provides a key food source for shorebirds like the red knot. 

Useful to the fishing industry as bait, and to the pharmaceutical industry, which uses the crab’s blue blood to keep IV drugs and vaccines sterile, horseshoe crabs have been under intense harvesting pressure over the past century. Populations of the American horseshoe crab have declined across its entire native range. In the Delaware Bay, until recently considered a horseshoe crab stronghold, its numbers have crashed by as much as 90%. Adding to this pressure, the intertidal zones so important to horseshoe crab reproduction are likely to be inundated and eroded as polar glaciers melt. L. polyphemus has survived several mass extinction events of Earth’s deep past, yet a 2024 data review by the Center for Biological Diversity assessed that without more targeted protection, chances are high that the already overexploited American horseshoe crab will not survive the changes that global warming will bring to our shorelines.

The good news on that sobering forecast, however: we do know what can and needs to be done to keep horseshoe crabs part of our shoreline ecosystems for future generations to treasure as we do today. International Horseshoe Crab Day is here to remind us of that!

Scanned from volume five of James De Kay's Zoology of New York of 1843, the image above has no clear artist attribution. What we do know is that De Kay’s work is part of an ambitious survey commissioned by the New York State Legislature in 1836 to document the state’s natural resources. Medical-doctor-turned-naturalist James De Kay led the survey’s zoological component and over four years of fieldwork with his team documented approximately 2,300 different animals in New York State. Descriptions and illustrations for 700 of these—many of the latter bearing artistic standards set by the British-born American painter John William Hall, a core member of De Kay’s team—were published as a four-volume set. While the original motivations for the overall survey project were economic, like many of the other publications that emerged from it, De Kay’s Zoology provided a foundational study for understanding New York State’s complex and biologically rich natural environment.

Wait, what? World Turtle Day is today, May 23m 2026?! Yes, indeed it is, and it's giving us irresistible incentive to break what's been a far too long pause in our activity on this wonderful platform. As it happens, our feature today comes from an exhibit about biodiversity loss that we opened at our lobby earlier this spring (more info on that here for anyone interested): We give you, the bog turtle, a.k.a Glyptemys muhlenbergii, a species native to several states in the Eastern U.S., including New York State.

Bog turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii). Illustrated by Richard F. Deckert. In H. L. Babcock, The Turtles of New England (Boston, Mass., 1919). Plate 28. Note: the bog turtle's scientific name reflects its first identification as a unique species in the late 18th century by Pennsylvania clergyman and botanist Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg.

Measuring at just about palm-sized (5 inches), the bog turtle is the smallest of all turtle species in North America. Sadly, this winsome creature is critically endangered. Bog turtles need sunny marshes to thrive. When those landscapes transition to forest with natural succession, bog turtles must move to areas that are still open marsh to survive. But human settlement, farmland conversion, urbanization, and beaver eradication have shrunk and fragmented the expansive wild wetlands once common in the Northeast. As open fens have become scarcer, so have bog turtles. In 1997 G. muhlenbergii was listed as a threatened species by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, making it eligible for targeted conservation policy and action. Assessment data of 2025 has prompted the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to declare the bog turtle now critically endangered. In New York, one of the last remaining G. muhlenbergii populations lives in a protected Finger Lakes bog, not that far from Cornell University's campus. As for many other reptile and amphibian species of our world, for this species to thrive once more, effective habitat restoration efforts will be key.

As challenging as that might sound, it behooves us to remember we've seen some success stories in turtle conservation in recent decades. The case of the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) is among them.

Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas). In J.F. Brandt and J.T.C. Ratzeburg, Medizinische Zoologie, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1829). Plate 22. Note: "Chelonia esculenta" is an obsolete name for the green sea turtle that reflects the reason for intense historical human interest in this species: “esculenta" is Latin for "edible."

Ranging widely across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, green sea turtles were once one of the most abundant marine megafauna on our planet. Yet, exposed to some of the most extreme pressures that humans have brought to bear on the animal world—from intense levels of hunting for their meat and eggs to widespread destruction of their coastal nesting sites and a high incidence of bycatch ensnarement in the global fishing industry—regional populations of C. mydas crashed dramatically for much of the 20th century.

Fortunately, the story has gotten better. In their highly visible plight, green sea turtles became a cause célèbre in the 20th century international conservation movement. As it galvanized attention and concern around the world, effective action followed: successfully enforced legal protections, remarkable community-based efforts to preserve nesting habitat, and consistent international cooperation. Data gathered over recent years suggest a clear turnaround in the green turtle’s fate. The global population of C. mydas has rebounded by almost 30% since the 1970s, and in many places of their range their numbers appear stable and poised to grow.

Lorenzo Langstroth, 1890. From Langstroth on the hive & honey bee, rev. by Dadant. 1892.

December 25th, Christmas Day, is a day for sharing and giving. It also happens to be the birthday of a man known as the father of American beekeeping: Lorenzo Langstroth, born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1810. With both happy occasions in mind, Mann Library is pleased to announce a resource that we’re pretty sure students of beekeeping and its history will find a wonderful gift: a fully digitized, searchable copy of Langstroth’s handwritten personal journal. Where a researcher would have once had to make an in-person trip to our special collections reading room to attempt a deciphering of Langstroth’s (infamously difficult to read) handwriting, the journal is now freely available (and actually readable!) as both a digitized version of the original work and in a transcribed form as part of the online Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Page from "Journal on matters relating to bees, etc.," unpublished manuscript, Lorenzo Langstroth 1852-1895. in the special collections of Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.

For those not yet fully in the know, Lorenzo Langstroth looms large in American beekeeping history thanks to discoveries and inventions he made as a self-taught apiarist, innovations which essentially revolutionized the 19th century practice of beekeeping in North America and facilitated its development into the profitable industry of today. His guide on beekeeping, The Hive and the Honeybee, was first published in 1853 and remains in print even today.  Langstroth’s story is also poignantly notable for a reason that you don’t have to a be a beekeeper to appreciate deeply: his struggles with debilitating depression, which stymied many of his professional endeavors. While working intermittently as a pastor and teacher when his mental health allowed, Langstroth found constant, life-affirming inspiration in the bee world he observed closely through the prism of the hives he kept for most of his adult life.

The history of beekeeping stretches back to prehistoric times, but when Langstroth patented his movable frame beehive in 1852 it created a worldwide revolution in the practice of keeping bees. On this page of his journal, we see the exact moment—the “aha” moment—that Langstroth landed on his brilliant insight: the significance of applying the concept of "beespace" to design hives that allow easier harvesting of honey than possible in earlier hive structures. The rest, as they say, is history.

The journal Langstroth kept is a treasure for several reasons. It provides fascinating insight into pivotal moments of beekeeping’s technological history. It is, as well, an intimate view of resilience in face of sometimes devastating mental health challenges. And last but really not least, in the comments and pet peeves that Langstroth also recorded in his ongoing notes-to-self, his off-the-record writing offers a more mundane but no less instructive tour through the day-to-day concerns—from keeping bee hives productive to the vexing challenges of protecting trade secrets and securing patents for promising new discoveries in a timely way—that would have been top-of-mind for any aspiring agricultural entrepreneur of the 19th century.

Page from "Journal on matters relating to bees, etc.," unpublished manuscript, Lorenzo Langstroth 1852-1895. in the special collections of Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.

The online availability of Langstroth’s journal in both its handwritten and transcribed form has been a work very long in the making. When early 20th century entomologist Everett Franklin Phillipps joined the Cornell faculty 1924, he made it his mission to establish one of the world’s most important collections of beekeeping materials—now known as the E. F. Phillips Collection at Mann Library. Recognizing the importance of one of this collections’ gems—the Langstroth journal—for the beekeeping field, Phillips began the painstaking process of transcribing 600 pages of its cramped, highly slanted script—rendered even more illegible by the frequent ink bleed-through from other pages—into easily readable typescript. The project remained unfinished at the time of Phillips passing in 1951, and others took up the work intermittently over the following decades. But it wasn’t until the epic pandemic-era national lockdown of 2020 that intrepid collections specialist Betsy Elswit finally found herself with the time needed to finish transcribing of the journal's final 200 pages.  Thanks to this heroic work, a browse through the work on the Biodiversity Diversity Heritage Library today provides a look at Langstroth’s original writing with a side-by-side view of transcribed, machine-readable text.  Thank you Betsy! And thank you, Reverend Langstroth, for persevering through the inspirational highs and deep lows of life to impact the practice of beekeeping so profoundly, and to leave us such a rich record of such remarkable scientific observation and personal achievement.

Featured in the photographs above is some remarkable hand and sewing-machine stitching done in 1893 by Dorothea Beach, a 6th grader at a public school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sample is from the archives of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences housed at Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Above: Title page, Lake Placid Conference of Home Economics Proceedings;  photo of Flora Rose (l) and Martha van Rensselaer (r) at a League of Women Voters meeting, Hyde Park, NY, 1920 (from Human Ecology Historical Photographs

The AAFCS was founded as the American Home Economics Association at the Lake Placid Conference of 1909. Participants at the annual conference, who had been meeting annually for 10 years,  were passionate about turning the formerly invisible work of women into vibrant arenas for building creative expertise. For the early pioneers of the field, Cornell’s Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose among them, home economics (also known as domestic science and, later, family and consumer sciences) would be a force for liberation. As a newly emerging field of study in land-grant colleges and other educational institutions, it would help women transform practical skills into creative capacity for finding innovative solutions problems that affect both individuals and society as a whole. A key area for this work was the challenge women faced keeping themselves and their families well clothed, despite the hardships of poverty and crises in the national economy.

Above from top:  Display of garments made from men's shirts arranged by Cornell home economics faculty for Farmers Week, 1919; Display of conserved hats prepared for an exhibit at the New York State Fair, 1918.(Both photos from the Human Ecology Historical Photographs collection). 

Through community workshops, live demonstrations at county fairs, and free publications, home economists have sought over the years to help their communities take on the issue of making, maintaining, and repurposing clothing. Teaching children good stitch work was an important start, but the ultimate goal was to grow this basic skill into a nimble ability to refashion unlikely resources, lean household budgets and thread bare clothes included, into fresh elements of a pleasing wardrobe.

“Keeping Clothes Wearable”, by Gladys L. Butt. Cornell Extension Bulletin 536, October 1942, in the archives of the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; also viewable online.  

“Mending Clothes and Household Fabrics,” by Gladys L. Butt. Cornell Extension Bulletin 871, 1954; in the archives of the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; also viewable online. 

“First Lessons in Sewing: A Manual for Junior Extension Workers in Clothing,” Cornell Junior Extension Bulletin No. 1, 1918, in the archives of the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; also viewable online. 

Page from the handout “Restitch and Renew to Keep Clothes in Use,” by Bernetta Kahabka, Extension Specialist, Cornell University, 1974, in the home economics archives of the Rare and Manuscript Division of Cornell University Library. 

Most of the guides to sewing and stitching shown here are available as part of Mann Library’s online Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History (HEARTH) ,  the Cornell Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA), and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. These online repositories offer valuable (yet free!) resources for anyone interested in re-learning the art of making new from old.  “Upcycling,” a term first coined in the early 1990s, has become a common word as awareness of more sustainable “slow fashion” principles has grown. What does it mean exactly? According to merriam-webster.com, to upcycle is “to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item : to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value).” For (happily) growing numbers of us, upcycling has become a fine craft that combines old traditions and techniques with contemporary style to create uniquely personalized wearable art that also signals a conscious effort to avoid harmful waste and use resources sustainably. With a little bit of mindfulness and maybe some handy “how-to’s found in digitized, freely available historical materials, the old can indeed become some bright new for one and all.

Excerpted from Mann Library’s spring 2023 exhibit, Sustaining Style: Towards Responsible Fashion