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These are interesting specimens because they illustrate
how permanent herbarium specimens are.
The one on your left was collected by Evan Pugh in 1856
in the neighborhood of Heidelberg.
The one on the right was collected
by a modern German botanist Ulrich Kull
in 2012 from the same general location,
the same part of Germany.
And you'll note that they are identical.
Although this specimen has had the experience
of being collected in Heidelberg in 1856.
And then taken across the Atlantic Ocean
and then by train somehow or other to Pennsylvania,
and then by horse-drawn vehicle to State College
from Bellefonte, which was the closest you
could get by rail at that time.
And this shows that if you dry a plant and press it flat,
you've reduced it to almost entirely cellulose and nothing
will happen to it if you keep it dry and free
from insects and anything else that might want to destroy it.
If you leave it alone, keep it dry, it remains the same.
You'll notice that the paper from the Pugh specimen
has darkened a little bit.
That's because there was enough lignin in that paper
that it makes an acid reaction and has slightly
darkened the paper instead of being
like the one on the right, which is an acid-free paper
and probably will stay white for a long time.
If you look at Evan Pugh's specimen,
you can see that all he did was record
that it came from Heidelberg and the date he collected it.
Nowadays, although this isn't even enough information,
you at least have the exact location
of the place in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
where it came from.
That's the German state in which Heidelberg occurs.
And it tells what kind of an environment it was.
It tells that the corollas were yellow.
Of course, you can see probably in both of these
that the corollas were yellow, but that's not always the case.
Sometimes they turn black in drying.
And you need to know that.
It's nice to record information of that sort.
Nowadays, we also are obliged to provide the latitude
and longitude of the locality and not
just to say that it's in general terms like this.
This man should really now have a GPS
that he can give you the exact latitude and longitude.
And the herbarium is full of specimen
that we would like to have more information about but they
didn't used to give much in the 19th century.