Pill box containing 'Sugar and Saltpetre (nitre)'. Saltpetre is potassium nitrate, a compound used in a range of industrial processes from making fireworks and explosives, to glass blowing and food curing. It is also used in fertilizers.

This sample and pill box come from a 14-drawer cabinet found in the Herschel family home in the 1950s. Collectively 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 is one of a set of pill boxes each containing a different chemical and/ or mineral sample presumably used by John F.W. Herschel or his children (it may even have been used by John F.W. with his children) as the raw materials for experiments.