was a freelance science journalist in New York
City. One day, while going over in my mind
what I could write about next, I realized that
Haverford, Pennsylvania was only a few hours’
drive away from Manhattan. I quickly made
a phone call and talked with Diana Peterson,
Haverford's Manuscripts Librarian and College
Archivist. Could I drive down and talk with her,
and possibly flip through the lab notebook for
myself? Yes, I could.
If you haven’t been to Haverford, you owe
it to yourself to go. Founded in 1833 as the
Haverford School by Quakers from New York
and Philadelphia, the college is one of the
earliest institutions founded by the Religious
Society of Friends in the United States. It is
nonsectarian now, but Quaker elements still
infuse its ethos, an example of which is its
honor code, one of the oldest in the nation.
Also, the tree-lined drive up to the main
campus is particularly spectacular.
Parrish himself was a Philadelphia Quaker,
and enrolled at Haverford in 1888. He stayed
for only three years, though, at which point
he left to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts. His course of study included English,
history, analytical geometry, and German, but
unfortunately, studying art was not considered
respectable. According to Parrish, art was
“looked upon with suspicion, as maybe related
distantly to graven images and the like.”
“Everybody wants to see this,” said Diana
Peterson as she lead me to a special viewing
room in the college’s library and placed a plain
conservator’s box on a round table. She opened
the box and pulled out the Parrish notebook.
It was surprisingly small, with a dark brown
cover that looked old. I opened the book and
almost immediately saw Parrish’s hand-written
signature.
On the inside cover, Parrish had written a
note explaining his decision to donate the
notebook to the college, presenting it to
Professor Lyman Beecher Hall in 1910. (Hall
had taught chemistry when Parrish was a
student.) The handwriting was beautiful, a fluid,
rounded hand with calligraphic flourishes. It
was clearly the writing of a person who could
imagine including more in his lab book than
data, someone who could view the lab book as
more than just a dry repository of numbers.
SciArt in America December 2013
I flipped through the pages one by one, taking
photos as I went. One page catalogued what
happened during “Experiment 12,” when Parrish
treated copper with dilute nitric acid. In his
elegant handwriting, Parrish describes the steps
of the experiment, but the eye is drawn to a
watercolor drawing of an oversized test tube.
Blue gunk has settled to the bottom, and from
the top issues a sepia-toned vapor that wafts
over the text. On the page for Experiment 37
Parrish notes a procedure in which he places
some wood pieces in a “perfectly dry testtube” and heats them. But the page’s highlight
is the heading, made up of swooping letters
and numbers, with the 3 and 7 merged into a
stylized design that looks like Tolkien’s elvish
script. The page for Experiment 78 features a
plump beaker labeled “Nitric Acid and Tin,”
spewing red watercolor smoke, while a da