Excerpt from The Essex Naturalist, Vol. 14: Being the Journal of the Essex Field Club, January, 1905-December, 1906

Dried plants are not readily exhibited, and if exhibited are not generally attractive, It is true they may be mounted in frames and glazed, but they require much space for their display upon the wall. A preferable mode is to hinge the glazed frames to an upright standard, so that they be made partially to revolve. The proper course, however, is to preserve the specimens in an herbarium, and to consult them as books may be consulted in a library.

Fortunately our Club possesses a good collection of dried plants, preserved in eight cabinets, now in the Stratford Museum. This herbarium includes the important donation of specimens due some years ago to the generosity of Mr. C. Shenstone it contains also the late Mr. Sewell's collection, presented by his widow, Mr. E. Powell's herbarium, and Dr. Varenne's collection of Cryptogams. I understand from Mr. W. Cole that he is about to arrange these herbaria in two series - the one a general collection of British plants for the use of the student, the other limited absolutely to the Flora of Essex) Our local herbarium will be invaluable to future botanists, inasmuch as we possess representatives of plants from numerous localities in Essex now built over or otherwise lost to science.

A large number of our Essex specimens have been obtained from the Forest district, but it hardly seems desirable to remove these to the Forest Museum, inasmuch as there they could scarcely be exhibited to advantage. Although an herbarium is clearly of the highest value to the student of systematic botany, it is hardly a suitable object for public exhibition. Indeed Prof. Weiss, of Manchester - a very high authority - has said I regard the Herbarium as not forming part of a Probably the ordinary visitor would find good coloured plates of the ¿owers of the Forest more serviceable than dried specimens, for these have generally lost to a large extent their colour and even their shape, so that the tyro would be more likely to identify his specimen from a well-executed coloured plate than from the dried plant.

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