When early spring comes, one can make a point of reviewing his herbarium and refreshing one's memory, so as to begin where he left off last fall. Thus each season's work is clear gain. The very labor necessary to make a herbarium impresses the flower and its peculiarities vividly upon the memory. If you handle and linger over your flowers, they will seem to you like pets whose sweet faces you cannot forget.

You want your herbarium, then, for reference, just as you need an encyclopædia in your library. You want it when the snow is on the ground and there is no "living nature" in the flower realm to study.

Every page of the herbarium should look neat and pretty. In order to secure this result you must first know how to press your flowers. A flower once wilted can never be made to look nice on paper. It is therefore necessary to keep fresh the specimen you wish to preserve. You might carry a large book, and shut your flowers in it as soon as plucked. But that would be inconvenient. A better way is to buy a botany box and carry it with you in all your walks. You never know when you may find some new thing. The box is of tin, opening on one side, and it may hang by straps from your shoulder. If you lay a little wet moss inside, and close the door every time you lay in a flower, your plants will keep fresh in their cool dark nest for three or four days.

To press them tear up newspapers into uniform sizes. Newspapers are porous, and absorb the moisture from plant stems and leaves better than brown wrapping-paper. Insert several leaves of the newspaper between the single flowers. When all are ready, place the whole pile between two boards, the same size as the papers (any carpenter will cut them for you), and lay the whole under a heavy weight, like a trunk or pile of large books. Once a day look over your plants, and put those not quite pressed into clean dry papers. The papers already used, unless badly stained, can be spread out, dried, and used again. The problem is how to dry the plant quickly and thoroughly. The quicker it is dried the better it retains its colors. The petals will fade, but careful pressing will make them look very well, not at all like hay. If the plant be taken out of its press too soon its leaves will wrinkle. Some delicate plants will dry in twenty-four hours' time, others take three or four days, or even a week.

Have ready sheets of nice white paper. These you can get a printer to cut for you of uniform size. The regulation size is 17 by 11 inches. If the specimen be too long for the paper, bend the stem once or twice. A botanical specimen should include the whole stalk down to the root, unless, like some of the taller sunflowers, it be quite too long for the page. Place only one specimen on a page, and fasten it in several places with narrow strips of gummed paper. Last fall I had a bright idea. After the election I collected a number of unused ballot pasters. From these next summer I shall cut blank strips, already gummed, and I shall moisten them with a wet camel's-hair brush, and use them for my herbarium. Large leaves will stay down better if a drop of mucilage be placed in their centre. When the stem is very heavy I sew it with double thread tied on the under side, or I cut two small slits in my paper, and slip the stem through. As fast as sheets are prepared, leave them under a large book till the mucilage is dry. The page is then ready for labelling. Write now in the lower right-hand corner your own name, the botanical and common name of the flower, where and when found; or you can get labels with your name printed on them, which you can paste on the bottom of your page.

HERBARIUM OF J. BROWN.

Caltha palustris

(Marsh-Marigold).

In marsh near Bridgeport, May 3, 1894.

The papers belonging to the same family should now be placed inside of family covers, made of still brown paper, and these again should be inclosed in a box. I use the boxes in which tailors send my husband's shirts and suits of clothes. On the cover of the box write the families which it contains. That plan facilitates finding any particular specimen. Certain families, as ferns and orchids, go well together; mints and figworts are allied. Composites should have a box to themselves, and the species should be gathered into genus covers.