The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

This guide to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia opens on a January evening in 1812, when seven local men crowded into a parlor to talk shells, minerals and beetles, then kept meeting above a Market Street bakery until they founded the Academy that March. It follows one of them, the self-taught naturalist Thomas Say, who moved into the building to live frugally as its unpaid librarian and caretaker, cataloguing new species by night. The smell of the bakery ovens below reportedly drifted right up through the floorboards where they met.