Five sheets of mica in a bag. This pill box come 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.

Until the 19th century mica in Europe was rare and expensive, then large reserves were found and mined in Africa and South America. Today mica is mainly used in electrical equipment, making use of its insulating properties and its chemical stability but in the 19th century sheets of mica were often used in optical experiments.