Purcell and Gould also distill and comment on the unruly collection of Willem Cornelis van Heurn, a 20^th-century Dutch naturalist who avidly collected specimens at home and abroad, and worked with the natural history museum in the Dutch city of Leiden. Van Heurn amassed bulk quantities of material—a method with little scientific payoff. He prepared pig skins, dog skins, and other specimens, making copious measurements and documenting small differences among members of the same species. According to Gould, the only paper van Heurn wrote that "even comes close to commenting on a conceptual issue in evolutionary theory" was titled, "Do tits lay eggs together as the result of a housing shortage?"

Among the montages that Purcell created from van Heurn's collection are the moles at right. These, too, were collected and prepared with zealous regularity. In Purcell's photo, van Heurn's scientifically unremarkable specimens are turned into an abstract array of scalloped forms, a patterned carpet with bright hands flashing like starbursts.