Languedoc. Pop. (1906) 482,779. Area, 2403 sq. m. It is bounded N.E. by
Gard, N.W. by Aveyron and Tarn, and S. by Aude and the Golfe du Lion.
The southern prolongation of the Cevennes mountains occupies the
north-western zone of the department, the highest point being about 4250
ft. above the sea-level. South-east of this range comes a region of
hills and plateaus decreasing in height as they approach the sea, from
which they are separated by the rich plains at the mouth of the Orb and
the Herault and, farther to the north-east, by the line of
intercommunicating salt lagoons (Etang de Thau, &c.) which fringes the
coast. The region to the north-west of Montpellier comprises an
extensive tract of country known as the Garrigues, a district of dry
limestone plateaus and hills, which stretches into the neighbouring
department of Gard. The mountains of the north-west form the watershed
between the Atlantic and Mediterranean basins. From them flow the
Herault, its tributary the Lergue, and more to the south-west the Livron
and the Orb, which are the main rivers of the department. Dry summers,
varied by occasional violent storms, are characteristic of Herault. The
climate is naturally colder and more rainy in the mountains.
A third of the surface of Herault is planted with vines, which are the
chief source of agricultural wealth, the department ranking first in
France with respect to the area of its vineyards; the red wines of St
Georges, Cazouls-les-Beziers, Picpoul and Maranssan, and the white wines
of Frontignan and Lunel (pop. in 1906, 6769) are held in high
estimation. The area given over to arable land and pasture is small in
extent. Fruit trees of various kinds, but especially mulberries, olives
and chestnuts flourish. The rearing of silk-worms is largely carried on.
Considerable numbers of sheep are raised, their milk being utilized for
the preparation of Roquefort cheeses. The mineral wealth of the
department is considerable. There are mines of lignite, coal in the
vicinity of Graissessac, iron, calamine and copper, and quarries of
building-stone, limestone, gypsum, &c.; the marshes supply salt. Mineral
springs are numerous, the most important being those of
Lamalon-les-Bains and Balaruc-les-Bains. The chief manufactures are
woollen and cotton cloth, especially for military use, silk (Ganges),
casks, soap and fertilizing stuffs. There are also oil-works,
distilleries (Beziers) and tanneries (Bedarieux). Fishing is an
important industry. Cette and Meze (pop. in 1906, 5574) are the chief
ports. Herault exports salt fish, wine, liqueurs, timber, salt,
building-material, &c. It imports cattle, skins, wool, cereals,
vegetables, coal and other commodities. The railway lines belong chiefly
to the Southern and Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee companies. The Canal du
Midi traverses the south of the department for 44 m. and terminates at
Cette. The Canal des Etangs traverses the department for about 20 m.,
forming part of a line of communication between Cette and Aigues-Mortes.
Montpellier, the capital, is the seat of a bishopric of the province of
Avignon, and of a court of appeal and centre of an academic (educational
division). The department belongs to the 16th military region, which has
its headquarters at Montpellier. It is divided into the arrondissements
of Montpellier, Beziers, Lodeve and St Pons, with 36 cantons and 340
communes.
Montpellier, Beziers, Lodeve, Bedarieux, Cette, Agde, Pezenas,
Lamalou-les-Bains and Clermont-l'Herault are the more noteworthy towns
and receive separate treatment. Among the other interesting places in
the department are St Pons, with a church of the 12th century, once a
cathedral, Villemagne, which has several old houses and two ruined
churches, one of the 13th, the other of the 14th century; Pignan, a
medieval town, near which is the interesting abbey-church of Vignogoul
in the early Gothic style; and St Guilhem-le-Desert, which has a church
of the 11th and 12th centuries. Maguelonne, which in the 6th century
became the seat of a bishopric transferred to Montpellier in 1536, has a
cathedral of the 12th century.
HERAULT DE SECHELLES, MARIE JEAN (1759-1794), French politician, was
born at Paris on the 20th of September 1759, of a noble family connected
with those of Contades and Polignac. He made his debut as a lawyer at
the Chatelet, and delivered some very successful speeches; later he was
_avocat general_ to the parlement of Paris. His legal occupations did
not prevent him from devoting himself also to literature, and after 1789
he published an account of a visit he had made to the comte de Buffon at
Montbard. Herault's account is marked by a delicate irony, and it has
with some justice been called a masterpiece of interviewing, before the
day of journalists. Herault, who was an ardent champion of the
Revolution, took part in the taking of the Bastille, and on the 8th of
December 1789 was appointed judge of the court of the first
arrondissement in the department of Paris. From the end of January to
April 1791 Herault was absent on a mission in Alsace, where he had been
sent to restore order. On his return he was appointed _commissaire du
roi_ in the court of cassation. He was elected as a deputy for Paris to
the Legislative Assembly, where he gravitated more and more towards the
extreme left; he was a member of several committees, and, when a member
of the diplomatic committee, presented a famous report demanding that
the nation should be declared to be in danger (11th June 1793). After
the revolution of the 10th of August 1792 (see FRENCH REVOLUTION), he
co-operated with Danton, one of the organizers of this rising, and on
the 2nd of September was appointed president of the Legislative
Assembly. He was a deputy to the National Convention for the department
of Seine-et-Oise, and was sent on a mission to organize the new
department of Mont Blanc. He was thus absent during the trial of Louis
XVI., but he made it known that he approved of the condemnation of the
king, and would probably have voted for the death penalty. On his return
to Paris, Herault was several times president of the Convention, notably
on the 2nd of June 1793, the occasion of the attack on the Girondins,
and on the 10th of August 1793, on which the passing of the new
constitution was celebrated. On this occasion Herault, as president of
the Convention, had to make several speeches. It was he, moreover, who,
on the rejection of the projected constitution drawn up by Condorcet,
was entrusted with the task of preparing a fresh one; this work he
performed within a few days, and his plan, which, however, differed very
little from that of Condorcet, became the Constitution of 1793, which
was passed, but never applied. As a member of the Committee of Public
Safety, it was with diplomacy that Herault was chiefly concerned, and
from October to December 1793 he was employed on a diplomatic and
military mission in Alsace. But this mission helped to make him an
object of suspicion to the other members of the Committee of Public
Safety, and especially to Robespierre, who as a deist and a fanatical
follower of the ideas of Rousseau, hated Herault, the follower of the
naturalism of Diderot. He was accused of treason, and after being tried
before the revolutionary tribunal, was condemned at the same time as
Danton, and executed on the 16th Germinal in the year II. (5th April
1794). He was handsome, elegant and a lover of pleasure, and was one of
the most individual figures of the Revolution.
See the _Voyage a Montbard_, published by A. Aulard (Paris, 1890); A.
Aulard, _Les Orateurs de la Legislative et de la Convention_, 2nd ed.
(Paris, 1906); J. Claretie, _Camille Desmoulins ... etude sur les
Dantonistes_ (Paris, 1875); Dr Robinet, _Le Proces des Dantonistes_
(Paris, 1879); "Herault de Sechelles, sa premiere mission en Alsace"
in the review _La Revolution Francaise_, tome 22; E. Daudet, _Le Roman
d'un conventionnel. Herault de Sechelles et les dames de Bellegarde_
(1904). His _Oeuvres litteraires_ were edited (Paris, 1907) by E.
Dard. (R. A.*)
HERB (Lat. _herba_, grass, food for cattle, generally taken to represent
the Old Lat. _forbea_, Gr. [Greek: phorbe], pasture, [Greek: pherbein],
to feed, Sans. _bharb_, to eat), in botany, the name given to those
plants whose stem or stalk dies entirely or down to the root each year,
and does not become, as in shrubs or trees, woody or permanent, such
plants are also called "herbaceous." The term "herb" is also used of
those herbaceous plants, which possess certain properties, and are used
for medicinal purposes, for flavouring or garnishing in cooking, and
also for perfumes (see HORTICULTURE and PHARMACOLOGY).
HERBARIUM, or HORTUS SICCUS, a collection of plants so dried and
preserved as to illustrate as far as possible their characters. Since
the same plant, owing to peculiarities of climate, soil and situation,
degree of exposure to light and other influences may vary greatly
according to the locality in which it occurs, it is only by gathering
together for comparison and study a large series of examples of each
species that the flora of different regions can be satisfactorily
represented. Even in the best equipped botanical garden it is impossible
to have, at one and the same time, more than a very small percentage of
the representatives of the flora of any given region or of any large
group of plants. Hence a good herbarium forms an indispensable part of a
botanical museum or institution. There are large herbaria at the British
Museum and at the Royal Gardens, Kew, and smaller collections at the
botanical institutions at the principal British universities. The
original herbarium of Linnaeus is in the possession of the Linnaean
Society of London. It was purchased from the widow of Linnaeus by Dr
(afterwards Sir) J. E. Smith, one of the founders of the Linnaean
Society, and after his death was purchased by the society. Herbaria are
also associated with the more important botanic gardens and museums in
other countries. The value of a herbarium is much enhanced by the
possession of "types," that is, the original specimens on the study of
which a species was founded. Thus the herbarium at the British Museum,
which is especially rich in the earlier collections made in the 18th and
early 19th centuries, contains the types of many species founded by the
earlier workers in botany. It is also rich in the types of Australian
plants in the collections of Sir Joseph Banks and Robert Brown, and
contains in addition many valuable modern collections. The Kew
herbarium, founded by Sir William Hooker and greatly increased by his
son Sir Joseph Hooker, is also very rich in types, especially those of
plants described in the _Flora of British India_ and various colonial
floras. The collection of Dillenius is deposited at Oxford, and that of
Professor W. H. Harvey at Trinity College, Dublin. The collections of
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, his son Adrien, and of Auguste de St
Hilaire, are included in the large herbarium of the Jardin des Plantes
at Paris, and in the same city is the extensive private collection of Dr
Ernest Cosson. At Geneva are three large collections--Augustin Pyrame de
Candolle's, containing the typical specimens of the _Prodromus_, a large
series of monographs of the families of flowering plants, Benjamin
Delessert's fine series at the Botanic Garden, and the Boissier
Herbarium, which is rich in Mediterranean and Oriental plants. The
university of Gottingen has had bequeathed to it the largest collection
(exceeding 40,000 specimens) ever made by a single individual--that of
Professor Grisebach. At the herbarium in Brussels are the specimens
obtained by the traveller Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, the
majority of which formed the groundwork of his _Flora Brasiliensis_. The
Berlin herbarium is especially rich in more recent collections, and
other national herbaria sufficiently extensive to subserve the
requirements of the systematic botanist exist at St Petersburg, Vienna,
Leiden, Stockholm, Upsala, Copenhagen and Florence. Of those in the
United States of America, the chief, formed by Asa Gray, is the property
of Harvard university; there is also a large one at the New York
Botanical Garden. The herbarium at Melbourne, Australia, under Baron
Muller, attained large proportions; and that of the Botanical Garden of
Calcutta is noteworthy as the repository of numerous specimens described
by writers on Indian botany.
Specimens of flowering plants and vascular cryptograms are generally
mounted on sheets of stout smooth paper, of uniform quality; the size
adopted at Kew is 17 in. long by 11 in. broad, that at the British
Museum is slightly larger; the palms and their allies, however, and some
ferns, require a larger size. The tough but flexible coarse grey paper
(German _Fliesspapier_), upon which on the Continent specimens are
commonly fixed by gummed strips of the same, is less hygroscopic than
ordinary cartridge paper, but has the disadvantage of affording
harbourage in the inequalities of its surface to a minute insect,
_Atropos pulsatoria_, which commits great havoc in damp specimens, and
which, even if noticed, cannot be dislodged without difficulty. The
majority of plant specimens are most suitably fastened on paper by a
mixture of equal parts of gum tragacanth and gum arabic made into a
thick paste with water. Rigid leathery leaves are fixed by means of
glue, or, if they present too smooth a surface, by stitching at their
edges. Where, as in private herbaria, the specimens are not liable to be
handled with great frequency, a stitch here and there round the stem,
tied at the back of the sheet, or slips of paper passed over the stem
through two slits in the sheet and attached with gum to its back, or
simply strips of gummed paper laid across the stem, may be resorted to.
To preserve from insects, the plants, after mounting, are often brushed
over with a liquid formed by the solution of 1/4 lb. each of corrosive
sublimate and carbolic acid in 1 gallon of methylated spirits. They are
then laid out to dry on shelves made of a network of stout galvanized
iron wire. The use of corrosive sublimate is not, however, recommended,
as it forms on drying a fine powder which when the plants are handled
will rub off and, being carried into the air, may prove injurious to
workers. If the plants are subjected to some process, before mounting,
by which injurious organisms are destroyed, such as exposure in a closed
chamber to vapour of carbon bisulphide for some hours, the presence of
pieces of camphor or naphthalene in the cabinet will be found a
sufficient preservative. After mounting are written--usually in the
right-hand corner of the sheet, or on a label there affixed--the
designation of each species, the date and place of gathering, and the
name of the collector. Other particulars as to habit, local abundance,
soil and claim to be indigenous may be written on the back of the sheet
or on a slip of writing paper attached to its edge. It is convenient to
place in a small envelope gummed to an upper corner of the sheet any
flowers, seeds or leaves needed for dissection or microscopical
examination, especially where from the fixation of the specimen it is
impossible to examine the leaves for oil-receptacles and where seed is
apt to escape from ripe capsules and be lost. The addition of a careful
dissection of a flower greatly increases the value of the specimen. To
ensure that all shall lie evenly in the herbarium the plants should be
made to occupy as far as possible alternately the right and left sides
of their respective sheets. The species of each genus are then arranged
either systematically or alphabetically in separate covers of stout,
usually light brown paper, or, if the genus be large, in several covers
with the name of the genus clearly indicated in the lower left-hand
corner of each, and opposite it the names or reference numbers of the
species. Undetermined species are relegated to the end of the genus.
Thus prepared, the specimens are placed on shelves or movable trays, at
intervals of about 6 in., in an air-tight cupboard, on the inner side of
the door of which, as a special protection against insects, is suspended
a muslin bag containing a piece of camphor.
The systematic arrangement varies in different herbaria. In the great
British herbaria the orders and genera of flowering plants are usually
arranged according to Bentham and Hooker's _Genera plantarum_; the
species generally follow the arrangement of the most recent complete
monograph of the family. In non-flowering plants the works usually
followed are for ferns, Hooker and Baker's _Synopsis filicum_; for
mosses, Muller's _Synopsis muscorum frondosorum_, Jaeger & Sauerbeck's
_Genera et species muscorum_, and Engler & Prantl's _Pflanzenfamilien_;
for algae, de Toni's _Sylloge algarum_; for hepaticae, Gottsche,
Lindenberg and Nees ab Esenbeck's _Synopsis hepaticarum_, supplemented
by Stephani's _Species hepaticarum_; for fungi, Saccardo's _Sylloge
fungorum_, and for mycetozoa Lister's monograph of the group. For the
members of large genera, e.g. _Piper_ and _Ficus_, since the number of
cosmopolitan or very widely distributed species is comparatively few, a
geographical grouping is found specially convenient by those who are
constantly receiving parcels of plants from known foreign sources. The
ordinary systematic arrangement possesses the great advantage, in the
case of large genera, of readily indicating the affinities of any
particular specimen with the forms most nearly allied to it. Instead of
keeping a catalogue of the species contained in the herbarium, which,
owing to the constant additions, would be almost impossible, such
species are usually ticked off with a pencil in the systematic work
which is followed in arranging them, so that by reference to this work
it is possible to see at a glance whether the specimen sought is in the
herbarium and what species are still wanted.
Specimens intended for the herbarium should be collected when possible
in dry weather, care being taken to select plants or portions of
plants in sufficient number and of a size adequate to illustrate all
the characteristic features of the species. When the root-leaves and
roots present any peculiarities, they should invariably be collected,
but the roots should be dried separately in an oven at a moderate
heat. Roots and fruits too bulky to be placed on the sheet of the
herbarium may be conveniently arranged in glass-covered boxes
contained in drawers. The best and most effective mode of drying
specimens is learned only by experience, different species requiring
special treatment according to their several peculiarities. The chief
points to be attended to are to have a plentiful supply of botanical
drying paper, so as to be able to use about six sheets for each
specimen; to change the paper at intervals of six to twelve hours; to
avoid contact of one leaf or flower with another; and to increase the
pressure applied only in proportion to the dryness of the specimen. To
preserve the colour of flowers pledgets of cotton wool, which prevent
bruising, should be introduced between them, as also, if the stamens
are thick and succulent, as in _Digitalis_, between these and the
corolla. A flower dissected and gummed on the sheets will often retain
the colour which it is impossible to preserve in a crowded
inflorescence. A flat sheet of lead or some other suitable weight
should be laid upon the top of the pile of specimens, so as to keep up
a continuous pressure. Succulent specimens, as many of the
_Orchidaceae_ and sedums and various other Crassulaceous plants,
require to be killed by immersion in boiling water before being placed
in drying paper, or, instead of becoming dry, they will grow between
the sheets. When, as with some plants like _Verbascum_, the thick hard
stems are liable to cause the leaves to wrinkle in drying by removing
the pressure from them, small pieces of bibulous paper or cotton wool
may be placed upon the leaves near their point of attachment to the
stem. When a number of specimens have to be submitted to pressure,
ventilation is secured by means of frames corresponding in size to the
drying paper, and composed of strips of wood or wires laid across each
other so as to form a kind of network. Another mode of drying is to
keep the specimens in a box of dry sand in a warm place for ten or
twelve hours, and then press them in drying paper. A third method
consists in placing the specimen within bibulous paper, and enclosing
the whole between two plates of coarsely perforated zinc supported in
a wooden frame. The zinc plates are then drawn close together by means
of straps, and suspended before a fire until the drying is effected.
By the last two methods the colour of the flowers may be well
preserved. When the leaves are finely divided, as in _Conium_, much
trouble will be experienced in lifting a half-dried specimen from one
paper to another; but the plant may be placed in a sheet of thin
blotting paper, and the sheet containing the plant, instead of the
plant itself, can then be moved. Thin straw-coloured paper, such as is
used for biscuit bags, may be conveniently employed by travellers
unable to carry a quantity of bibulous paper. It offers the advantage
of fitting closely to thick-stemmed specimens and of rapidly drying. A
light but strong portfolio, to which pressure by means of straps can
be applied, and a few quires of this paper, if the paper be changed
night and morning, will be usually sufficient to dry all except very
succulent plants. When a specimen is too large for one sheet, and it
is necessary, in order to show its habit, &c., to dry the whole of it,
it may be divided into two or three portions, and each placed on a
separate sheet for drying. Specimens may be judged to be dry when they
no longer cause a cold sensation when applied to the cheek, or assume
a rigidity not evident in the earlier stages of preparation.
Each class of flowerless or cryptogamic plants requires special
treatment for the herbarium.