Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/538

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508
PRESERVATION OF

Hume and Mr. Evans of Stepney, is very remarkable in this respect. Every leaflet of its very compound leaves separates from its stalk in drying, and even those stalks all fall to pieces at their joints.

Dried specimens are best preserved by being fastened, with weak carpenter's glue, to paper, so that they may be turned over without damage. Thick and heavy stalks require the additional support of a few transverse strips of paper, to bind them more firmly down. A half sheet, of a convenient folio size, should be allotted to each species, and all the species of a genus may be placed in one or more whole sheets. On the latter the name of the genus should externally be written, while the name of every species, with its place of growth, time of gathering, the finder's name, or ary other concise piece of information, may be inscribed on its appropriate paper. This is the plan of the Linnæan Herbarium, in which every species, which its original possessor had before him when he wrote his great work the Species Plantarum, is numbered both in pencil and in ink, as well as named, the former kind of