Word: specimens
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...Washington the Smithsonian Institution is shipping 57,200 insects to a secret cache. Why all the fuss over a tattered bug on a rusty pin? Or a frowsy bird skin? A pickled fish? Because these are the type specimens—the original catches from which the species was first scientifically described and defined. Like the platinum-iridium bar in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres on which the meter is engraved, each specimen is the standard against which other members of the species and new varieties are measured...
...insect pest, for example, must first be compared and classified before it can be efficiently combated. Evolutionary changes, which only careful comparison can verify, have appeared in some species since the type specimen was first chosen, a century or two ago. And, though any curator can catch a Musca domestica (or housefly) in his own soup, he would probably give his right ear to have the original type. Among other items selected for bomb-sheltering from the Smithsonian collection (valued at $300,000,000 but irreplaceable, says one of its officers, at three times that figure...
...them; no future in it. And yet all there is left, unless she knows a handsome ensign, is the 4F Club. Brrr. What a plight for the womanhood of America. Should they starve for food with a soldier or starve for romance with a mentally, morally, and physically unfit specimen of the warlike...
...necessary funds were advanced by William Thayer of Boston, a philanthropist who had endowed Agassiz Zoological Museum, and the Herbarium came into being under the leadership of Doctor Gray, who ambitiously despatched specimen collectors all over the globe, and who himself engaged in careful research work and carried on a detailed correspondence with Darwin and other prominent scientists of the period. At present, the Herbarium is under the direction of Merritt L. Fernald '97. Fisher Professor of Natural History...
Physically, the Budenny specimen is still, at 58, superb. He rides like a trooper, fences without guards, can snuff out a candle with a revolver bullet at 40 paces. He has a voice like the roar of a breaking ice-jam. Manly to excess, he is a born leader in the medieval sense of the term...