A small but mesmerising display in Cornell's Corson Hall: about a dozen of the Blaschkas' impossibly detailed glass models of octopuses, sea slugs, jellyfish, and anemones. The colours and textures are hand-applied; the tentacles and frills are spun glass thinner than fishing line. They are at once scientific instruments and decorative art.
Free to view during building hours. Combine with the Wilder Brain Collection upstairs in Uris Hall for a particularly Cornell afternoon — two oddly specific collections, both reflecting the campus's late-nineteenth-century moment of empirical ambition.