no ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW 
Kew ; and their scope was so extensive that this privilege was largely 
utilised by scientists both at home and abroad. 
Kew possessed no official herbarium until 1853, when the herbarium 
and library that had belonged to W. Arnold Bromfield, M.D., were 
presented to the establishment by his sister. That 
was its real beginning. All the collections made by 
Herbarium ear ^ Kew collectors were retained by Sir Joseph 
Banks during his lifetime ; after his death they went 
to the British Museum, where they are still preserved. In 1854, 
George Bentham presented his herbarium and library to Kew. 
Sir William Hooker’s herbarium was not acquired until 1866, when 
it was purchased, along with his library, by Government. The 
material of Hooker and Bentham formed the real basis of the Kew 
Herbarium, which since then has been annually augmented by many 
thousands of specimens, chiefly by gift and exchange, but to some 
extent also by purchase and bequest. 
To accommodate these vast acquisitions of material, the old 
house has had to be twice enlarged. One wing, built in 1877, extends 
from the back in the direction of the river ; the second 
s ’ was built in 1902, and extends westwards. At the 
present time the Herbarium is lodged in these two wings, each of 
which is a quadrangle measuring 86 feet by 43 feet. The Library 
is in the original Hunter House. Besides the ground floor, each wing 
of the Herbarium building has two galleries. The cabinets (number- 
ing about 1,300) in which the specimens are kept stand back to back 
in the spaces between the windows. Ordinary specimens are glued 
down on sheets of stiff paper measuring i6| inches by io-|- inches. 
Many tropical plants with enormous leaves, flowers, and fruits, like the 
larger palms, it is, of course, impossible to have represented except 
by fragments, even when larger sheets are used. But wherever possible, 
the leaf, the flower, the fruit, and a portion of the branch are preserved 
— sufficient, that is, to fix and identify the species. Separate specimens 
from different localities are valued as showing not only the geo- 
graphical range of a species, but also its variability under such diverse 
conditions as it may experience within that range. 
The Herbarium now comprises over 2,000,000 specimens. It is 
exceedingly rich in “ types ” — a “ type ” being the actual specimen, 
or one of them, on which the original description was based by the 
person who first gave the plant its name. In the general arrange- 
