All of the world's great museums fall into two categories. You have your Smithsonian Institution or your British Museum, great centers of research and learning, gathering and distilling information in the service of science. And then you have your collections of just deeply weirdstuff. (Think "Ripley's Believe it or Not.")

But most museums of the first type start off as the second. Their collections are often the final product of the private obsessions of prominent eccentrics (usually Victorians, for some reason), men and women who, if they had lived in the 21st century, would have been prescribed really powerful drugs.

Which brings us to the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

The museum, actually three museums of earth and life sciences plus another devoted to anthropology, is one of the great institutions of the Bay State.

Located about a block from Harvard Yard (avoid, if you can, the guys in the crimson T-shirts giving the unofficial "Hahvahd Tour") the museum, spread through a couple of floors of a sprawling pile of neogothic brick, is free Sunday mornings to residents of Massachusetts. I got to go with my college-age daughter on a research project recently, proving once again that one of the main reasons for having kids is that it lets you tag along with them to fun places. (Well, yes we went to Frontierland at Disney, but only because the girls wanted to. The fact that the fort on Tom Sawyer Island was just like the toy one I used to have came as a complete surprise to me.)

The museum holds examples of everything shot, stuffed, netted, dug up, bargained for, uncovered or just plain lifted across seven continents, all of it labeled, mostly in Latin. It is Harvard, after all.

But I would bet there is nothing anywhere quite like what you find just as you enter. In a darkened room that smells faintly of chemicals are the glass flowers. These are hundreds of precise replicas of plants and blooms done over the course of half a century by a family of German glass blowers for a professor at the university.

In the days before color photography, there was no way to show botany students how, for example, a tropical flower might be constructed or what the variegated hues of acer rubrum (the red maple) would look like in the fall. The pieces are so perfect that first-time visitors often ask, "OK, now where are the glass flowers," because they think what they've seen are actually living plants.

Now I have to get to work on that big ball of rubber bands I've been collecting. Because you just never know what someone might want to see one day.