Phacelia malvifolia Cham.

This is a pressed and mounted herbarium specimen of Phacelia malvifolia Cham. (mallow-leaved phacelia), a bristly annual native to California. Two branching stems bear lobed, textured leaves pinned with paper straps to an archival sheet. A handwritten collection label attributes the specimen to J.W. Cussman and cites the Royal Botanic Garden. Herbarium sheets like this one belong to the same documentary tradition as natural-history illustration — the impulse to fix, label, and circulate observed specimens — that fed the engraved botanical plates of Curtis's Botanical Magazine and the annotated picture-sheets whose descriptive conventions passed directly into the labeled panels of early comic strips.