ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Hypericum caespitosum Cham. & Schltdl.

· Collected 1885, accessioned 1886

Hypericum caespitosum Cham. & Schltdl.
This is a pressed herbarium specimen, not a political cartoon or caricature. The mounted plant — a dried example of *Hypericum caespitosum*, a small-flowered St. John's Wort native to Chile — was collected during an expedition to Atacama and later determined by multiple botanists whose annotations appear on the accompanying labels. It has no connection to the print satire tradition of Hogarth, Gillray, or Daumier, nor to the comic strip or comic book lineage. Displaying it in a caricature exhibition would misrepresent both the object and the history it actually documents: Andean botanical surveying in the nineteenth century.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/