Personal reflection of herbarium
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Answer:
Explanation:
The term herbarium, used in the strictest sense today, is simply a collection of dried specimens. Lawrence (1951) and others include in their definitions the arrangement of specimens in the sequence of an accepted classification and are available for reference or other scientific study. "Herbarium" used in its original sense, however, referred not to a collection of plants, but to a book about medicinal plants. Tournefort in about 1700 used the term as an equivalent to hortus siccus (Stearn, 1957), and this use was taken up by Linnaeus who also adopted it as a substitute for hortus siccus, hortus mortus, and others. It was largely through his influence that it superseded the former terms.
The procedure of pressing and drying specimens for storage has been an amazingly successful one in terms of preservation of detail and specimen longevity, and the plants so preserved provide a concrete basis for past, present and future studies. In its more than four-hundred-year history the .herbarium has become an institution. Today one associates the term herbarium not only with preserved plant specimens but also with certain botanical activities. The herbarium is the basic reference source of the taxonomist and has become a center for research as well as teaching and public information.
An herbarium, a special kind of museum, can also be regarded as a data bank with vast quantities of raw data. Each specimen has information content and therefore value which will, of course, vary depending on completeness of specimen and data and the source of the material. Each specimen has information about the vegetation of an area, a population, and the taxon to which it belongs (Rollins, 1965). The collection, therefore, represents a source of primary information about man's explorations and observations of the earth's vegetation, and document the results of much the past inquiry into the nature and relationships of plants. Herbarium specimens are now used for studies in the disci[plines which were probably never even dreamed of at the time early collections were made and herbaria organized. These studies include such fields as cytogeography, biochemical systematics, palynology, and genecology.