The flowers fill a good-size room, rows upon rows of display cases that for the most part contain what look like entirely ordinary plants. If you entered unknowing, you would wonder first how they are preserved, and perhaps second how they were cleaned so thoroughly in preparation. If you don't know that the flowers are glass, the exhibition is inscrutably mundane. If you do, it is even harder to comprehend.  

But the flowers date from an age in which technology was still a source of inspiring possibilities, not incrementally more craven shortcuts. A Harvard botany professor, dissatisfied with his materials, commissioned a German glassmaker and eventually his son to spend 50 years making meticulous glass models of 847 species of plants and their magnified entrails. Not only have we probably lost this skill, we have probably also lost the will. As usual, with our tools for studying our world we end up revealing ourselves.