HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES, MARIE JEAN (1759-1794), French politician, was born at Paris on the 20th of September 1759, of a noble family connected with those of Contades and Polignac. He made his début as a lawyer at the Châtelet, and delivered some very successful speeches; later he was avocat général to the parlement of Paris. His legal occupations did not prevent him from devoting himself also to literature, and after 1789 he published an account of a visit he had made to the comte de Buffon at Montbard. Hérault’s account is marked by a delicate irony, and it has with some justice been called a masterpiece of interviewing, before the day of journalists. Hérault, who was an ardent champion of the Revolution, took part in the taking of the Bastille, and on the 8th of December 1789 was appointed judge of the court of the first arrondissement in the department of Paris. From the end of January to April 1791 Hérault was absent on a mission in Alsace, where he had been sent to restore order. On his return he was appointed commissaire du roi in the court of cassation. He was elected as a deputy for Paris to the Legislative Assembly, where he gravitated more and more towards the extreme left; he was a member of several committees, and, when a member of the diplomatic committee, presented a famous report demanding that the nation should be declared to be in danger (11th June 1793). After the revolution of the 10th of August 1792 (see [French Revolution]), he co-operated with Danton, one of the organizers of this rising, and on the 2nd of September was appointed president of the Legislative Assembly. He was a deputy to the National Convention for the department of Seine-et-Oise, and was sent on a mission to organize the new department of Mont Blanc. He was thus absent during the trial of Louis XVI., but he made it known that he approved of the condemnation of the king, and would probably have voted for the death penalty. On his return to Paris, Hérault was several times president of the Convention, notably on the 2nd of June 1793, the occasion of the attack on the Girondins, and on the 10th of August 1793, on which the passing of the new constitution was celebrated. On this occasion Hérault, as president of the Convention, had to make several speeches. It was he, moreover, who, on the rejection of the projected constitution drawn up by Condorcet, was entrusted with the task of preparing a fresh one; this work he performed within a few days, and his plan, which, however, differed very little from that of Condorcet, became the Constitution of 1793, which was passed, but never applied. As a member of the Committee of Public Safety, it was with diplomacy that Hérault was chiefly concerned, and from October to December 1793 he was employed on a diplomatic and military mission in Alsace. But this mission helped to make him an object of suspicion to the other members of the Committee of Public Safety, and especially to Robespierre, who as a deist and a fanatical follower of the ideas of Rousseau, hated Hérault, the follower of the naturalism of Diderot. He was accused of treason, and after being tried before the revolutionary tribunal, was condemned at the same time as Danton, and executed on the 16th Germinal in the year II. (5th April 1794). He was handsome, elegant and a lover of pleasure, and was one of the most individual figures of the Revolution.
See the Voyage à Montbard, published by A. Aulard (Paris, 1890); A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1906); J. Claretie, Camille Desmoulins ... étude sur les Dantonistes (Paris, 1875); Dr Robinet, Le Procès des Dantonistes (Paris, 1879); “Hérault de Séchelles, sa première mission en Alsace” in the review La Révolution Française, tome 22; E. Daudet, Le Roman d’un conventionnel. Hérault de Séchelles et les dames de Bellegarde (1904). His Œuvres littéraires were edited (Paris, 1907) by E. Dard.
(R. A.*)
HERB (Lat. herba, grass, food for cattle, generally taken to represent the Old Lat. forbea, Gr. φορβή, pasture, φέρβειν, to feed, Sans. bharb, to eat), in botany, the name given to those plants whose stem or stalk dies entirely or down to the root each year, and does not become, as in shrubs or trees, woody or permanent, such plants are also called “herbaceous.” The term “herb” is also used of those herbaceous plants, which possess certain properties, and are used for medicinal purposes, for flavouring or garnishing in cooking, and also for perfumes (see [Horticulture] and [Pharmacology]).
HERBARIUM, or Hortus Siccus, a collection of plants so dried and preserved as to illustrate as far as possible their characters. Since the same plant, owing to peculiarities of climate, soil and situation, degree of exposure to light and other influences may vary greatly according to the locality in which it occurs, it is only by gathering together for comparison and study a large series of examples of each species that the flora of different regions can be satisfactorily represented. Even in the best equipped botanical garden it is impossible to have, at one and the same time, more than a very small percentage of the representatives of the flora of any given region or of any large group of plants. Hence a good herbarium forms an indispensable part of a botanical museum or institution. There are large herbaria at the British Museum and at the Royal Gardens, Kew, and smaller collections at the botanical institutions at the principal British universities. The original herbarium of Linnaeus is in the possession of the Linnaean Society of London. It was purchased from the widow of Linnaeus by Dr (afterwards Sir) J. E. Smith, one of the founders of the Linnaean Society, and after his death was purchased by the society. Herbaria are also associated with the more important botanic gardens and museums in other countries. The value of a herbarium is much enhanced by the possession of “types,” that is, the original specimens on the study of which a species was founded. Thus the herbarium at the British Museum, which is especially rich in the earlier collections made in the 18th and early 19th centuries, contains the types of many species founded by the earlier workers in botany. It is also rich in the types of Australian plants in the collections of Sir Joseph Banks and Robert Brown, and contains in addition many valuable modern collections. The Kew herbarium, founded by Sir William Hooker and greatly increased by his son Sir Joseph Hooker, is also very rich in types, especially those of plants described in the Flora of British India and various colonial floras. The collection of Dillenius is deposited at Oxford, and that of Professor W. H. Harvey at Trinity College, Dublin. The collections of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, his son Adrien, and of Auguste de St Hilaire, are included in the large herbarium of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, and in the same city is the extensive private collection of Dr Ernest Cosson. At Geneva are three large collections—Augustin Pyrame de Candolle’s, containing the typical specimens of the Prodromus, a large series of monographs of the families of flowering plants, Benjamin Delessert’s fine series at the Botanic Garden, and the Boissier Herbarium, which is rich in Mediterranean and Oriental plants. The university of Göttingen has had bequeathed to it the largest collection (exceeding 40,000 specimens) ever made by a single individual—that of Professor Grisebach. At the herbarium in Brussels are the specimens obtained by the traveller Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, the majority of which formed the groundwork of his Flora Brasiliensis. The Berlin herbarium is especially rich in more recent collections, and other national herbaria sufficiently extensive to subserve the requirements of the systematic botanist exist at St Petersburg, Vienna, Leiden, Stockholm, Upsala, Copenhagen and Florence. Of those in the United States of America, the chief, formed by Asa Gray, is the property of Harvard university; there is also a large one at the New York Botanical Garden. The herbarium at Melbourne, Australia, under Baron Müller, attained large proportions; and that of the Botanical Garden of Calcutta is noteworthy as the repository of numerous specimens described by writers on Indian botany.
Specimens of flowering plants and vascular cryptograms are generally mounted on sheets of stout smooth paper, of uniform quality; the size adopted at Kew is 17 in. long by 11 in. broad, that at the British Museum is slightly larger; the palms and their allies, however, and some ferns, require a larger size. The tough but flexible coarse grey paper (German Fliesspapier), upon which on the Continent specimens are commonly fixed by gummed strips of the same, is less hygroscopic than ordinary cartridge paper, but has the disadvantage of affording harbourage in the inequalities of its surface to a minute insect, Atropos pulsatoria, which commits great havoc in damp specimens, and which, even if noticed, cannot be dislodged without difficulty. The majority of plant specimens are most suitably fastened on paper by a mixture of equal parts of gum tragacanth and gum arabic made into a thick paste with water. Rigid leathery leaves are fixed by means of glue, or, if they present too smooth a surface, by stitching at their edges. Where, as in private herbaria, the specimens are not liable to be handled with great frequency, a stitch here and there round the stem, tied at the back of the sheet, or slips of paper passed over the stem through two slits in the sheet and attached with gum to its back, or simply strips of gummed paper laid across the stem, may be resorted to.
To preserve from insects, the plants, after mounting, are often brushed over with a liquid formed by the solution of ¼ ℔. each of corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid in 1 gallon of methylated spirits. They are then laid out to dry on shelves made of a network of stout galvanized iron wire. The use of corrosive sublimate is not, however, recommended, as it forms on drying a fine powder which when the plants are handled will rub off and, being carried into the air, may prove injurious to workers. If the plants are subjected to some process, before mounting, by which injurious organisms are destroyed, such as exposure in a closed chamber to vapour of carbon bisulphide for some hours, the presence of pieces of camphor or naphthalene in the cabinet will be found a sufficient preservative. After mounting are written—usually in the right-hand corner of the sheet, or on a label there affixed—the designation of each species, the date and place of gathering, and the name of the collector. Other particulars as to habit, local abundance, soil and claim to be indigenous may be written on the back of the sheet or on a slip of writing paper attached to its edge. It is convenient to place in a small envelope gummed to an upper corner of the sheet any flowers, seeds or leaves needed for dissection or microscopical examination, especially where from the fixation of the specimen it is impossible to examine the leaves for oil-receptacles and where seed is apt to escape from ripe capsules and be lost. The addition of a careful dissection of a flower greatly increases the value of the specimen. To ensure that all shall lie evenly in the herbarium the plants should be made to occupy as far as possible alternately the right and left sides of their respective sheets. The species of each genus are then arranged either systematically or alphabetically in separate covers of stout, usually light brown paper, or, if the genus be large, in several covers with the name of the genus clearly indicated in the lower left-hand corner of each, and opposite it the names or reference numbers of the species. Undetermined species are relegated to the end of the genus. Thus prepared, the specimens are placed on shelves or movable trays, at intervals of about 6 in., in an air-tight cupboard, on the inner side of the door of which, as a special protection against insects, is suspended a muslin bag containing a piece of camphor.
The systematic arrangement varies in different herbaria. In the great British herbaria the orders and genera of flowering plants are usually arranged according to Bentham and Hooker’s Genera plantarum; the species generally follow the arrangement of the most recent complete monograph of the family. In non-flowering plants the works usually followed are for ferns, Hooker and Baker’s Synopsis filicum; for mosses, Müller’s Synopsis muscorum frondosorum, Jaeger & Sauerbeck’s Genera et species muscorum, and Engler & Prantl’s Pflanzenfamilien; for algae, de Toni’s Sylloge algarum; for hepaticae, Gottsche, Lindenberg and Nees ab Esenbeck’s Synopsis hepaticarum, supplemented by Stephani’s Species hepaticarum; for fungi, Saccardo’s Sylloge fungorum, and for mycetozoa Lister’s monograph of the group. For the members of large genera, e.g. Piper and Ficus, since the number of cosmopolitan or very widely distributed species is comparatively few, a geographical grouping is found specially convenient by those who are constantly receiving parcels of plants from known foreign sources. The ordinary systematic arrangement possesses the great advantage, in the case of large genera, of readily indicating the affinities of any particular specimen with the forms most nearly allied to it. Instead of keeping a catalogue of the species contained in the herbarium, which, owing to the constant additions, would be almost impossible, such species are usually ticked off with a pencil in the systematic work which is followed in arranging them, so that by reference to this work it is possible to see at a glance whether the specimen sought is in the herbarium and what species are still wanted.