Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

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discover all kinds of interesting things. Things that interested me perhaps at that particular time. I want to know, for example, what does Quercus alba look like? And with those two words, go and look into that tremendous collection of things and find out something that looked like Quercus alba, or a thing which people call Quercus alba. And I could discover what the thing looked like; I could discover perhaps where the plants representing Quercus alba grew, and all sorts of little goodies and information about them. Now another way of thinking about herbarium specimens is this: that they are a fine set of historical documents. Many of the early collections in this country will bear the label Boston, Massachusetts, and I suspect that if we went back to Boston, Massachusetts right now, we would discover that the place that the man picked up this particular specimen is now completely covered with concrete and steel and yet we have some evidence that this was indeed a plant which did grow in that area before man came along and messed around with the environment. So in a sense it is a, it can be used as a fine record of what we have had in the past, although it is an incomplete record. I also want to give you some feeling about these particular specimens because in your handling of them in the next few weeks, I want you to have the same sense of importance that these particular specimens have such that you will treat them with the respect to which they, you should give them. Now how do we use herbarium specimens? We use them again according to the dictates of the time in which we exist. Primarily, we derive information about the plant materials from herbarium specimens concerning their gross external morphology. But as we have gone along improving our data collection methods and our refinements in what we want to know about plants, we have been able to use these old brown herbarium sheets in many different interesting sorts of ways. For example, although the specimen be dried, it still maintains quantities of cellulosic material and allied substances which do not modify tremendously upon drying. For example, you can study quite adequately the anatomical features of certain parts of the plants. If you are ingenuous