76 



does not seem to blacken the plants and hastens their drying 

 appreciably. 



Too large and too generous specimens are an abomination 

 when it comes to mounting them. It is best to use drying papers 

 a little smaller than the standard size of herbarium sheets ; then 

 there will be no difficulty in getting the specimens upon the sheets. 

 Sometimes one receives specimens so large that they must be 

 almost ruined in trimming them down to the size of the mount- 

 ing paper. 



If a sheet contains more material than can be conveniently 

 mounted upon an ordinary herbarium sheet it necessitates the 

 writing of a new label or else the throwing away of the surplus 

 material. The second course is perhaps the better, for it is very 

 seldom that one cares for two sheets of one collection. If one 

 sheet is properly filled it should, except in rare cases, contain 

 material enough for the study of a plant. 



Besides the use for corrugated paper mentioned above we have 

 found it useful in mounting. When we are gluing plants upon 

 the sheets we lay a piece of the corrugated paper over the glued 

 plant, corrugated side down, and then a drier upon this, contin- 

 uing in this manner until we have a pile of sufficient height to be 

 placed somewhere and weighted until the glue has thoroughly 

 dried. The corrugated paper, because of its corrugations, has 

 less surface to stick to the plant and holds it in contact with the 

 mounting paper just as well as the driers or sheets of pasteboard 

 would do. 



The accompanying figure shows an end view of a piece of appa- 

 ratus that we have found very useful for moistening straps in 

 strapping herbarium specimens. It was designed and made by Mr. 

 O. B. Metcalfe, who was formerly student assistant in botany here. 

 A A are pieces of wood about 3 i^ inches long and i ^ inches wide ; 

 to these is riveted a strip of galvanized iron C, which is T-shaped 

 at the ends so as to cover the blocks of wood ; upon the wood 

 are tacked two or three layers of ordinary felt drying paper, BB ; 

 in order to make the paper last longer it is covered with a 

 piece of cloth of medium thickness, E. The apparatus is then 

 placed in a small tin pan, D (the lid of a baking powder box will 



