Botanical Museums

Abstract

IN your excellent article on Botanical Museums, one point appears to have been overlooked, and to which, with your permission, I should like to call attention. I allude specially to the want of an extensive series of carefully prepared specimens and dissections illustrative of the principal modifications of form and structure to be met with in plants. To the ordinary student of botany, especially to the beginner, a series of herbarium specimens conveys about as much information as a similar collection of postage stamps would do. It is not until the pupil has made some considerable progress that he is in a position to make use of herbarium specimens with advantage to himself for anything more than superficial examination. The supply of fresh specimens in a large town like London is necessarily limited, if not in point of numbers, at least in variety. Would it not therefore be advisable in any future re-organisation of our botanical museums, to meet this want so far as it is possible to do so? A collection, such as I am alluding to, should comprise specimens selected and displayed in such a manner as to show the principal variations in the structure and form of the several organs of plants from the lowest to the highest. It should illustrate, so far as circumstances will allow, the comparative anatomy and physiology of plants much in the same way as the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons illustrates the peculiarities of animal life. In such a museum the system should be subordinated to the plants, not the plants to the system. I am quite aware that in all three establishments to which you call attention some specimens of the kind I refer to are to be found. In the Edinburgh Botanical Museum also are to be seen models and preparations made under the superintendence of Professor Balfour by several of his pupils. It is such specimens as these that for educational purposes it is so desirable to multiply and collect together in a separate department. Where, from the nature of things, such as the delicacy or minute size of the organ or what not, it is not possible to prepare a satisfactory specimen for reference, large models in wax or papier maché might be substituted with advantage. What teacher who has had to initiate the tyro into the complexities of the sphenoid bone or the disposition of the ovules, the structure of the anther, the development of the flower, the arrangements of the flowers in grasses, &c., but has longed for Brobdignagian models whereon to demonstrate the peculiarities of their formation. The organs themselves are often so small, and require so much practice with the use of the dissecting needle before they can be seen by the student, that it is very desirable to aid his preliminary labours as much as possible; to give him, at least, a general idea of what he is to look for in the living specimen. For want of this preliminary help specimens are often wasted by the inexpert pupil, who becomes disgusted because he is unable to see for himself what his books or his teachers tell him he ought to see. A good collection of microscopical preparations should also be provided to illustrate such points as require the use of the compound microscope. Probably the British Museum would be the most fitting place wherein to exhibit such specimens side by side or in conjunction with those illustrative of fossil plants. If some such plan as that hinted at in your article were adopted, we should have the general collections at Kew in conjunction with the gardens and Economic museum, the historical and structural collections at the British Museum, and the Trade Museum at South Kensington. I cannot conclude this letter without adverting to the facilities which exist at Kew for the determination of unknown plants, and particularly of plants cultivated in gardens. Thanks to the admirable arrangements made by former and by the present curator of the herbarium and their assistants, the determination of an unknown plant becomes, comparatively, an easy matter.