Fern History, Fry Glass and a Militiaman's Sword LONDON - Last month the historian Sarah Whittingham nearly tripped over a rope blocking access to a Victorian house museum parlor here. "I'm so drawn to it," she said, referring to the room's bay window, an 1870s protruding glass case originally meant for sheltering ferns. A staff member at the brick town house, 18 Stafford Terrace in the Kensington neighborhood, let Ms. Whittingham step over the rope, and she wound past the overstuffed furniture to study the window closely. The interior looks much as it did when the home's owner, the cartoonist and photographer Linley Sambourne, lived there. Ms. Whittingham, the author of the new book "Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania" (Frances Lincoln), explained that Sambourne's wife, Marion, recorded in her diaries how often she "did fern cases." Windows on three floors of the house still bulge with aquariumlike protruding cases, where temperamental ferns were supposed to grow. Their spots are now mostly occupied by nonfern greenery. Hardly any other buildings in the world retain their traces of this late-19th-century craze, but Ms. Whittingham's book explains how it was widely promoted as a way to enrich colonial economies, amuse the masses and soothe the insane. Ms. Whittingham, a largely failed fern grower herself, started researching the topic in 1997, after stumbling on restored Victorian greenhouses stocked with ferns in Scotland. At the height of the fashion, in the 1870s, Britons imported the plants from Tasmania, the Philippines, Borneo and Brazil, among other places. Acquiring specimens in the wild could be hazardous; in 1867 a young woman fell off a Scottish cliff and died after reaching too far for a fern. Despite the dangers, British aristocrats insisted that the hobby suited the poor and people with mental illness. "Such study must exercise an ennobling and purifying effect on the human soul," a botanist wrote in 1866. Ms. Whittingham, after the Sambourne house tour, pointed to her book's early-1900s photo of fern cases wedged into hallway windows at an asylum in London. "If you were suffering from fern fever madness, you'd be in heaven," she said wryly. The text points out that the firmly fixed terrariums also kept deranged patients from leaping outside. This rarefied botanical pursuit is usually considered a British eccentricity, but Ms. Whittingham has turned up much proof that it reached American shores. The New York botanist Frances Theodora Parsons wrote an influential 1899 study, "How to Know the Ferns," and public and private greenhouse ferneries were established in Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago, among other cities. Ms. Whittingham's study showcases her own collection of Victorian fern-pattern antiques, including greeting cards, trinket boxes and a cast-iron fire grate. The material turns up widely in stores and online, now that her eye is attuned to the plants" feathery edges and spiral buds. She racked up 400 footnotes for her 256 pages and, she said, "I could have done a book twice the size." Henry Clay Fry operated a glass factory in Rochester, Pa., near the Ohio border, employing 1,000 people for the high-tech and luxury markets. Between 1901 and 1933, Fry offered pieces like laboratory beakers and headlight lenses, as well as fussy, cut-glass hatpin boxes; gold-trimmed sherbet goblets; and opalescent lampshades that rivaled the better-known wares of his competitors at Steuben. "If there was a buck to be made, he knew how to do it," said Dr. Clifton Dietz, a dentist and collector who has helped run a fan club in western Pennsylvania, the H. C. Fry Glass Society. Fry connoisseurs mostly live near the former factory, which had its own railroad spur and lavish gardens. The collecting group was long mentored by John A. and Dorothy Jordan, retirees who acquired Fry wares and wrote about them for three decades. Hundreds of pieces from their estate will be auctioned next Friday at Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates in Mount Crawford, Va., with estimates mostly of a few hundred dollars each. The Jordans" daughter, Kathleen Hayden, has kept hundreds more Fry products, some with delicate floral etchings and rare blue hues. "This was too much a part of our lives" to sell everything at once, she said in a recent phone interview. Her parents researched their collection partly by digging through glass shards still piled behind the former Fry factory. The company's molds and archives were apparently scrapped when the Great Depression drove it out of business, but excavations at the dump have yielded evidence of the colors and forms produced there. "That's been a great asset to us," said Mike Sabo, the president of the Fry Society. The Jordans had hoped to donate their pieces to a Fry museum that has not yet been realized. A few institutions keep Fry glass on view, including a coffee percolator and a cut-glass Liberty Bell at the Corning Museum of Glass, and a popcorn popper and fish hatchery jars at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. On May 5 the new Beaver County Industrial Museum will open in Darlington, near Rochester, and a gallery there with 40 Fry pieces is in the works. A New York militiaman's 1850 parade sword, worn with his upper-class regiment's uniform of brass-buttoned red coat and white pants, sold for $81,000 (10 times the high estimate) last month at Capo Auction in Queens. The buyer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will put it on view this fall with a handful of American ceremonial swords in the Arms and Armor galleries. "This was an idea of building on a very small foundation, adding another fine piece to the collection," said Stuart W. Pyhrr, the Met curator who bid at Capo. On the sword handle a gilded female warrior holds a wreath and shield, and the scabbard bears the name of the original owner, the Manhattan hotel tycoon Richard French. Mr. Pyhrr recognized that an almost identical weapon, made for President Franklin Pierce, belongs to the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord. Pierce's sword is on view there through July 7. The auction consignors, Irene Math and her mother, Catherine Math, inherited it from an aunt. No one knows how it ended up in an umbrella stand at the aunt's Manhattan apartment, although the owner did have various in-laws interested in blades, including a champion fencer and an American admiral. The Maths had shown the weapon to larger auction houses, but only the Capo staff members saw its sales potential. When it was unwrapped at the Queens office, Irene Math said, "They were petting the sword like it was a baby."