Gaylussacia densa Cham. (Herbarium Specimen)
· Collected 1841, Natural History Museum, London
This is not a cartoon or caricature. It is a pressed botanical herbarium specimen — a dried branch of Gaylussacia densa Cham. (a huckleberry, family Ericaceae) — mounted on archival paper with handwritten collection notes reading "Summit of the Organ Mountains, Brazil, 1841," a color calibration chart, a metric scale bar, and successive taxonomic determination labels from 1953 and 1966. No satirical content, printmaking tradition, or caricature is present. Describing it as political satire would be factually false. A curator's honest label: this specimen documents nineteenth-century Austro-Brazilian botanical exploration and the Natural History Museum's ongoing practice of systematic re-determination across generations of taxonomists.
About this artifact
- Date
- Collected 1841, Natural History Museum, London
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by ComicBooks.com.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.