The Permanent Collection.

No. A - Nautilus Shell. Quote from P.T. Barnum's 1864 Guide Book to the American Museum: "Curious and beautiful in itself, the shell is made singular on account of the little creature which inhabits it: the only species of octopus to secrete a protective covering. The shell is very white, thin, buoyant, is constructed something like a boat, and serves as such, for the Nautilus rises in it fro m the depths of the ocean, pumps out the water which the shell contains by a curious apparatus with which nature has provided it, and spreading a little membrane to the air as a sail, traverses the surface of the ocean, in pleasant weather, as proudly as the stateliest ship. The little arms of the Nautilus also serve as oars to row it along, and one of them answers for a rudder to direct its course. On the appearance of danger it takes in its sail, fills the shell with water, and descends to the bottom." Sigmund Freud is rumored to have been fascinated with the Nautilus.

No. B - 1868 Lithograph Entitled "View Corner of Anne St. and Broadway, Former Site of P.T. Barnum's American Museum."

No. C - Carte de Visite Entitled "Tom Thumb, Wife and Child." Married in 1862, 'General Tom Thumb' (born Charles Sherwood Stratton) and Livinia Warren's wedding was celebrated by American and European high society as the union of the smallest couple in the world and commemorated with a series of carte de visite photographs. The couple displayed themselves at Barnum's American Museum and later, on a European tour in the late 1860's, took to posing with 'their baby,' borrowed for the occasion. This image (1868) captures a faux family moment between the little couple and a momentarily adopted infant, returned to her parents moments after the photograph was taken.

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No. D - Carte de Visite Entitled "The Crystal Palace, London," Signed Across the Back by an Anonymous Tourist, May 23rd, 1868. No. E - Lichen. Lichen are neither plant nor fungus, but a hybrid, an amalgam between the plantae and fungi kingdoms, crossing borders between our most basic classificatory divisions among organic structures. No. F - Blue Quartz Crystal Cluster, Mined from the Blue Ridge Mountains, PA, by Mme. Mercury Curie, Summer, 1933. No. G - Butterfly. Pieridae Gonepteryx alvinda, spp., male. No. H - Czech Coins and Bill, 2000.

No. I - Replica of the Soul of Chopin's Last Piano. Born in Poland, Frederic Francois Chopin died in Paris, 1849, of tuberculosis. His last piano disappeared soon after. We have recreated a probable replica of the contemporary state of the piano's sounding board, its 'soul.' The project was suggested by the original curators, Curie and Joyce, on a scrap of paper found among the remnants of the collection..

No. J - Ostrich Eggs, with 'Human Horns.' One Ms. Baedecker, a resident of New Jersey, NJ, grew a hornlike excrescence from the back of her head. It was removed in 1902 (right). By 1905, it had regrown , and was once more removed (left). By 1907, another 'horn' had been grown and removed, but it has been lost. The 'horns' are actually agitated warts encircled with scar tissue which spiral out from the host. Unlike the horns of elk, deer, narwhals, &c., human 'horns' lack ossiferous rigidity. The ostrich egg was given by Ms. Baedecker as a birthday gift to her niece, Ruthy, in 1912. In return, Ruthy, a friend of Mme. Mercury Curie, donated the horns and egg to our collection in 1937.

No. K - Yeti Research Station, Replica. In the late 1930's, Rabeya Premkumar, janitor for a small British colonial outpost in Kibar, India, near the Tibetan border, made a discovery that, had its findings been brought to light in the burgeoning global scientific community, would have rocked the foundations of evolutionary theory. Ms. Premkumar, with the help of three sherpas (names unknown), had befriended a family of yetis (or 'abominable snowmen') living in the snowy peaks of Mt. Shilla (23,050 feet above sea level). She christened the species Homo abominableus . The infant of the family stood at Ms. Premkumar's height, and the adults, over eight feet tall. Their silky coats were snowy white, their voices soft and deep. Before the family migrated North for the summer, the child yeti gave Ms. Premkumar five of her toys as a token of friendship. Doubtless, Rabeya Premkumar would have gone down in history as an unwilling Neo-Darwin, had it not been for her conviction that the yetis would have been treated as exotic animals to be hunted to extinction by British gamers. Certain that Homo sapiens could not deal with the knowledge of a species so similar yet uncanny to themselves, Ms. Premkumar compassionately concealed the knowledge of her findings, sharing it only with a few of her closest friends, the former curators among them.

No. L - An Entire Wing Dedicated to Sleep. Your Curators laboriously harvested the sleep from the corner of their eyes for a period of two months. The amount in the vial multiplied by 18 billion equals the amount of sleep produced per annum, worldwide.

No. O - Walter Benjamin's Lost Briefcase. Missing since 1940; interior manuscript still at large.