Specimens: The Sloane Herbarium | Herbarium World. Over a year ago I wrote a series of posts on herbarium specimens (1,2,3,4) I found particularly interesting. I’ve encountered many more since then, so it’s time to take up the topic again. One particularly rich mine is the 265-volume herbarium of Hans Sloane (1660-1753) in the Natural History Museum, London (NHM).
The museum’s principle herbarium curator Mark Carine is one of the investigators involved in the Sloane Lab which aims at digitally linking the Sloane collections at the NHM, the British Library (BL), and the British Museum (BM). The latter was founded to house the specimens—animals and vegetable—as well as the books, coins, art works, and anthropological materials Sloane had amassed (Delbourgo, 2017). Eventually the BM’s growing collections were dispersed to new institutions: the NHM in the 19th century and the BL in the 20th.
These rearrangements made sense organizationally, but caused logistical problems for researchers. References Das, S., & Lowe, M. (2018). Murphy, K. Specimens: Sloane’s Collections of Herbaria | Herbarium World. In the last post, I discussed Hans Sloane’s herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM) and work being done on exploring its contents. In this post, I want to highlight some of the fascinating specimens found by Brad Scott in his doctoral research on the collection. I’ll begin with medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas, not the likeliest person to come to mind in relation to herbaria. However, Scott found labels on James Cuninghame specimens cut from what Scott has identified as a 1567 edition of Aquinas. Using scrap paper for labels or for pressing specimens was not uncommon since paper was often scarce particularly for a shipboard surgeon like Cuninghame who traveled twice to China. Another indication of careful research is a recent lecture Scott gave on George Handisyd, also a ship’s surgeon who was involved in plant collecting, particularly in South America and around the Straits of Magellan.
References. Specimens: Multiples | Herbarium World. It is considered good practice in herbaria today to place just one collection on a sheet. This might include more than one plant, if they are small, but these are the result of one collection event, in one location. That wasn’t always the case in the past, and even today some curators, conscious of the high cost of herbarium sheets, hate to see a great deal of space go to waste. If the specimen is small, it might be positioned on a sheet so that there is room for at least one other specimen of the same species collected sometime in the future.
But if the plant is very small the temptation may remain, and result in rather interesting sheets. At one point on Twitter, there seemed to be a contest to see who could come up with the most crowded sheet, with one entry from the Natural History Museum, London (NHM) a sheet with six specimens, followed by the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh with eight fern specimens. There is yet another play on the unity and variety theme. References. Specimens: Curators’ Choices | Herbarium World.
When herbarium curators select specimens to display, either virtually or physically, what kinds of specimens do they choose? They might pick out “beautiful” specimens. Clare Drinkell, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew posted one with the comment: “Sometimes a beautifully pressed specimen just stops me in my tracks. Mrs Thring’s Centaurea montana collected in Switzerland ‘between the years 1845 and 1855.’” Jo Wilbraham, curator of algae at the Natural History Museum, London also has a good eye, posting an “elaborately pressed” specimen of the seaweed Mesogloia vermiculata, collected by Edward George in 1895 on the Isle of Man.
When she was asked what was the “most exotic” specimen in the collection of over a million, she “immediately retrieved a folder of Claudea elegans,” including a specimen collected in Australia by the Irish botanist William Henry Harvey. In all these announcements, there is a sense of the thrill of finding something new and out of the ordinary.