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In the Collection
Plants in Little Glass Boxes
by Charlie Davis, Herbarium Curator
The herbarium of the Natural History Society of Maryland contains a hodge-podge of specimens dating from the late 1880's to the present. Numbering about 5000 specimens, many are the remains of collections from the estates of deceased members, donations by Baltimoreans, and abandoned collections of the Maryland Academy of Sciences in the late 1930’s. A few are from other states: Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, obtained through exchanges by their former owner. This was a common practice of early naturalists and particularly pharmacists. Specimens include trees, shrubs, grasses, forbs, and lichens. Data on the specimens varies from good to none; some are scientifically significant while others have marginal value - but valuable for teaching nonetheless.
One
of the curious parts of the collection is stored in four, flat, pressed-cardboard
boxes. Within the boxes, wrapped in Baltimore American newspapers with
DUZ detergent advertisements, Krazy Kat comics, and war stories from 1944
are ninety-seven small glass-faced boxes with lichens inside. Each is
numbered and the black-inked handwritten labels identify the scientific
name of the lichen. Whose lichens were these? And why are they in glass
display boxes?
The handwriting provided one obvious clue. Dr. Charles C. Plitt studied lichens occurring around Baltimore in the early 1900’s. Plitt’s script on other herbarium sheets suggested that indeed Plitt had written these labels.
I discovered their historic significance while I was gathering biographical information about Plitt prior to the presentation of the 1993 Fladung Awards. While searching for information about Plitt at the Cook Library at Towson State University I came across this excerpt from the Bryologist reporting on an annual Sullivant Moss Society meeting:
"The fifth public meeting of the Society was held on Wednesday December 30, 1908, at Baltimore Maryland in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, then holding its sixtieth meeting. We were assigned a room in the Eastern Female High School Building....Mr. C. C. Plitt followed [fifth] with a paper on "The Lichens of Baltimore and Vicinity" illustrated with especially prepared specimens...Mr. Plitt drew attention to the advantages of his arrangement of lichens in glass boxes these permitting the upper and lower sides of the specimens to be easily observed. The little glass cases are held together by what are known as ‘insect mounting strips’ and can be obtained from A. I. Root & Co., the ‘bee’ people of Medina, Ohio, who make the well known honey boxes."
An
abstract of his talk appeared in the Bryologist in 1909. Here he stated
that his collection "consisted of 148 specimens representing 30 genera,
containing 107 species and their varieties." A gap in the sequence
of numbers on our boxes indicates that some of the boxes are missing.
Plitt shared with a colleague, George Knox Merrill (another prominent lichenologist "who had kindly looked at nearly everything I have collected."), that he was "disappointed in the lack of interest shown in my collection of Baltimore Lichens, upon the preparation of which I had bestowed so much time." Merrill replied that, "Almost all the good one gets out of the labor designed for the benefit of others, is the benefit to be derived from the close application to the subject studied."