Gymnadenia camtschatica (Cham.) Miyabe & Kudô

This pressed herbarium specimen — not a cartoon but a botanical voucher — was gathered in Japan during the 1860s and passed through the Herb. Horti Bot. Petropolitani (St. Petersburg Imperial Botanical Garden) before entering the collections of Herb. E. Cosson and ultimately the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The mounted orchid, a northern Asian terrestrial species, represents the era's systematic field collecting in East Asia. Such specimens underpinned the illustrated botanical folios and popular natural-history picture-sheets (Bilderbogen-adjacent in their encyclopedic ambition) that fed Victorian print culture — a parallel visual-documentation tradition to caricature from which sequential image-making, including early comics, partly descends.