Two skeins of raw silk in an envelope. This silk comes from a 14-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.

Silk could be used in a range of different experiments though it was perhaps intended to be used in John FW Herschel and his son John's investigations into the Cavendish experiment/ Baily torsion experiment (see AST1030.6).