Spiranthes romanzoffiana Cham. & Schltdl.

This herbarium sheet is not a cartoon or caricature but a botanical specimen sheet holding pressed, dried examples of Spiranthes romanzoffiana — Irish Lady's-tresses orchid — mounted on archival paper alongside manuscript and printed locality labels. The largest specimen, collected in Ireland in August 1843, is affixed to a diamond-shaped backing card in the Victorian convention. Additional gatherings from Cork (July 1870) and a Botanical Locality Record Club entry (No. 1286, 1904) document the plant's contested Irish range. Such sheets are the primary documents of natural history collection, ancestors of illustrated botanical print traditions that fed directly into the precision line-work of early scientific engraving — itself a graphic discipline continuous with the etching and wood-engraving trades that produced popular picture-sheets and, eventually, the comic page.