Monthly Picture: Laboratory Study of the Grasshopper

My father drew this in his Sophomore Biology Laboratory Notebook:

Can you imagine the attention span required to draw that with no obvious errors? The next four pages contain a hand-written discussion of the grasshopper, with two corrections; he filled the entire notebook using a pen and four colors of fluid ink.

Here’s a closer look at the grasshopper (clicky for more dots):

I cannot imagine assigning that task to present-day students…

Things were different in 1927, when he was 17 years old. They were about to get really different; 15 years later he was in the South Pacific.