It's a squeezy venue but the forty members who managed to fit into the Herbarium were treated to a wonderful talk by Dr Gintaras Kantvilas, and a rare opportunity to see at first hand some of the carefully preserved specimens that form the Herbarium's collection. Gintaras recounted the tangled history of some of the specimens -- one was first collected by the French, impounded in Batavia by the Dutch, seized by the English in transit to the Netherlands, and finally returned to the French through patient dialogue between the scientists, despite their nations' continuing war footing.