Pin cushion with vellum faces and velvet sides, with hand painted floral decoration on the vellum face. There are six evenly spaced pins pressed into one quarter of the sides.

This pin cushion comes from a 15-drawer cabinet found in the Herschel family home in the 1950s. The contents of this and a similar cabinet seem to suggest that they were used by successive generations of the family to store specimens, material and apparatus for carrying out experiments.

This pin cushion, however, is clearly domestic rather than scientific: it was found in the cabinet accompanied by a pair scissors suggesting a link with one of the many female members of this family.