Empty specimen tube with cork.

This specimen tube comes from a 15-drawer cabinet found in the Herschel family home in the 1950s. The contents of this and a similar cabinet seems 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 specimen tubes to hold botanical and geological specimens. This specimen tube could have belonged to any one or to all of them.