COLLECTING 994 
in, but beware of too enthusiastic pressure on the lever. 
You do not want to drive the flower into the blotting- 
paper, and merely require that the whole thing shall be 
sufficiently tight to keep the plant from shifting. The 
arrangement of the plant on the paper is merely a matter 
of infinite patience. You cannot hope that the colours 
will be preserved. Flowers are not like butterflies, which 
will retain all but the supreme freshness of their bloom 
for many years. We must be content to see red, white, 
and many blues resolve into a blackish hue, though 
yellow is more persistent. It is a good thing, if one 
has the skill, to paint on the mounting-sheet the living 
colour of the specimen. This mounting-sheet should 
bear upon it, with the flower, the particulars upon the 
original list, and it is a good rule that each sheet should 
bear examples of only a single genus. 
The very fleshy-leaved plants, such as the Stonecrops 
and Houseleeks, are a serious difficulty. The best way 
is to slice both stem and leaves, and scoop away the 
juicy part before putting them into the blotting-paper. 
I have read that they may be admirably preserved by 
baking them in sand, but I must confess that my own 
experiments in that direction were lamentable failures. 
Still, I recommend you to try it, for the sake of experience, 
and I wish you success. 
The best way of mounting is to paste thin slips of 
gummed paper across the stems, and over each cartridge 
sheet should be gummed from the top a covering flap of 
thinner paper. 
Now that photography is so common, excellent work 
can be done with a small hand-camera, and the snap- 
shots are often far more recognisable portraits than the 
withered originals when they escape from the blotting- 
