Wooden box with ten lenses. They may be spare lenses to be used in the construction of telescopes and other optical apparatus. The coloured lenses may have been used for a variety of different experiments though the most likely would have been to study optical phenomena (and could even date back to William Herschel's experiments on radiant heat in 1800) or photography.

These lenses 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.