Microscope slide holder. It 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.

Other findings in these cabinets show that various members of the family used microscopes to study botanical and geological specimens to study among other things their structure and in some cases their polarising properties. This slideholder could have belonged to any one or to all of them.