Bulletin - United States National Museum - Smithsonian Institution

FLORA OF WASHINGTON AND VICINITY. 235
7. General, remarks on herbarium work.
The herbarium is a perpetual growth. Every summer specimens of
your own collecting are added to it, and every winter still more are
received through exchange. Nothing ever goes out, but accessions are
constantly being made. It is therefore very important to keep a strict
account with it. You want to know at any moment not only what you
have, but how many you have. If asked how large your herbarium is,
you want to be able to answer by a glance at your account—4,000, or
whatever number of species it actually contains. You also want, if any
one asks you whether you have such and such a plant, to be able to reply, if
not from memory, which, of course, is not always possible, by a moment's
looking at something besides the specimens.
Very little herbarium work can generally be done during the collecting
season. It is often necessary, and perhaps best, not to attempt to distri-
bute current collections. After the season is over the plants collected and
preserved during the summer are first all arranged in botanical order j
then, beginning at the first, they are placed in two general sets, which your
notes and lists enable you to make, one of which contains only new, i. e.,
unmounted plants, and the other, specimens of species already mounted.
With regard to the first of these sets, of course your duty is simple;
they must be mounted and go to swell the general collection. But as
to the second, it will by no means do rashly to class them as dupli-
cates and as such put them away. Everj' one should be carefully com-
pared with what you have previously collected. So rapid will be your
improvement in making good specimens that you will be surprised often-
times that you should have considered the one previously put away a
good one. If, then, you have had the patience to refrain from mount-
ing the earlier ones, it will be no trouble to substitute the later and
better one. But in many cases where the first specimens were good
this comparison will enable you to supply missing forms and states
and help to render the herbarium perfect. After all such have been
thus compared and the specimens or parts needed for the herbarium
have been taken out for mounting, the remainder will constitute true
duplicates to be added to your list of duplicates, and put away in their
proper order in that department.
Next, as regards the winter accessions. Unavoidably there will come
in packages by exchange a good many i)lants that you already have in
your herbarium. These should be compared as above described, but,
as already remarked, if from other localities than any you have, they