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cleaned and “enhanced” with the addition of rainbow-hued silk flowers along its border, shone bright under the black lights of Chicago’s Milwaukee Street Pipefittery and Galleria, after which it was donated by the recently born-again Bill to the Rockford Historical Museum’s collection.
    Upon its arrival in Rockford, the crown prince’s valued treasure was placed in the museum’s basement where Vaughn Orville, retired school bus driver, now janitor, stands before The Butterfly Mirror late at night, smoking his fingers yellow, and dreams of wizards and round tables dancing around him in a spirit-cloud of wings.  At these times he hallucinates and sees himself as a little blonde-haired girl in a bonnet and red velvet, white laced dress.  She couldn’t be more happy.
     
     
     
     
    Kaleidoscopes of Africa
     
    “It has always been the fate of new inventions to have their origin referred to some remote period; and those who labour to enlarge the boundaries of science, or to multiply the means of improvement, are destined to learn, at a very early period of their career, that the desire of doing justice to the living is a much less powerful principal than that of being generous to the dead.
     
    Sir David Brewster
    Credited with inventing the first kaleidoscope in 1816
     
    Object 1:A fossilized giraffe femur, 18” long, 2” in diameter, discovered by Belgian archaeologist Jurgin Joachim, 22 August, 1898, on the west shore of Lake Nyasa, in what was then Nyasaland.  The outer surface of the bone looks to have been hewn with an adze or other chopping instrument.  Microscopic analysis shows miniscule flecks of obsidian, invisible to the human eye, embedded in hatched grooves cut lengthwise along the bone’s shaft.  The interior of the bone appears to have been core-drilled, again with obsidian, making the bone into an entirely hollow tube.  When discovered, the inside of the fossilized bone tube held several hundred brightly-colored pebbles, diamonds, and bits of shell, each approximately .5 mm across.  None of the pebbles come from the area, nor are the shells from indigenous species.  The nearest habitat of the relevant shellfish species is Antarctica.  The pebbles are likely from the Indian subcontinent, the diamonds from Angola.
     
    Exhibit 1:A diorama, recreating a scene witnessed by German anthropologist Heinrich Horstmann in the rainforest of eastern Belgian Congo, 1904.  A group of Bemba elders sits in a semi-circle at the mouth of a deep cave, all staring at an arrangement of highly-polished iron shards, the fragments set in such a way that they reflect multiple images of one another.  Immediately outside the cave a young man stokes a small fire beneath a Tabernanthe Iboga shrub, the smoke causing a cloud of thousands of gold-banded forester butterflies ( Euphaedea Neophron Neophron ) to take flight over the polished iron pieces.  A half-empty basket of psychoactive roots containing Ibogain alkaloid sits next to the elders.
     
    Object 2:Brass kaleidoscope, 8” long by 1” in diameter, belonging to the late British explorer, Doctor James Widdekind.  The object chamber of this instrument is filled with tiny dried arctic flower blossoms suspended in whale oil.  This kaleidoscope was discovered on the body of Dr. Widdekind, who had been overwhelmed, while travelling through German Togoland, stung to death and subsequently consumed by a massive tide of fire ants, as evinced by the entirely flesh-less skeleton of the late doctor and by the presence of several dead fire ants – still well preserved – in the view piece of the instrument.
     
    Object 3:Wooden Kaleidoscope, 6” long by 2” in diameter.  This instrument, constructed of maple, bears a carved inscription, in Arabic, of these lines from a traditional West African poem:
    As the sun by day, so the moon by night
    Breaks forth and gleams, lets our herds go to pasture.
    Where once it was cold, the chill’s now departed.
    See – is