31 



AN EXPERIENCE IN HEEBARIUM MAKING. 



By F. T. BiOLETTi. 



When 



had a supreme contempt for anything so puerile as the mak- 

 ing of a collection. An herbarium was, in my mind, on a par 

 with a stamp album, or a boy's string of birds' eggs.^ After a 

 few months however I began to suspect that my judgment 

 had been hasty, for a friend of mine who was making a col- 

 lection seemed to learn much more about plants, and to retain 

 it longer than I did. This partly convinced me, for, rather 

 than acknowledge inferiority of intellect on my own part, I 

 was willing to give up a point or two in favor of a collection. 

 I began to see that herbarium making had its uses; but the 

 ordinary cumbersome 15x10 specimens did not suit me at all; 

 so I began a collection on new principles. Each specimen 

 was about two inches long, was enveloped in a piece of paper 

 on which its name was written (that is to say one of its 

 names, for I had not yet learnt that a plant often goes under 

 a multiplicity of names), and was inserted between the leaves 

 of any book that I happened to be reading. By this means 

 I managed to learn the names of some species of fifty plants, 

 and the system worked well as long as I confined my herbor- 

 izing to the banks of Strawberry Creek, Berkeley; but under 

 the pressure of collections from several neighboring counties it 

 broke down entirely. I found that it was not always possible 

 to determine a lupine from one raceme of flowers and a leaf, 

 or a willow from a couple of staminate catkins. I was now 

 thoroughly convinced of a second error in judgment, and set 

 about making a collection after methods more approved. At 

 first I confined myself to the accumulating of the plants of 

 California; later to those of the United States of America; but 

 finally the fever of collecting took such entire possession of 

 me that my ambition was only bounded by the flora of the 

 world. A little exchanging with Eastern correspondents 

 however soon moderated this enthusiasm and sufiiced to show 

 me the impracticability of my aims. Now I incline to believe 

 that even a local collection is almost more than a private 



