From the exhibition
Tibouchina martialis (Cham.) Cogn.
· Collected 1842, Nueva Granada (Colombia)

This herbarium sheet preserves a dried specimen of *Tibouchina martialis*, a shrubby plant in the melastome family, collected in Socorro, Colombia in 1842 by the Belgian botanist Jean Jules Linden (no. 753). The mount — stem, leaves, and branching habit carefully pressed and fixed — is itself a form of scientific printmaking's cousin: systematic visual documentation that preceded and paralleled the engraved botanical plate tradition of Ehret, Redouté, and the *Flora Brasiliensis* volumes cited on the label. Such specimens anchored the illustrated natural-history publications whose page layouts, sequential annotation, and numbered series directly informed the visual grammar of early comic art.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/