Seaweed collecting

[2] Collecting seaweed can be traced back to at least the 17th century with the pressings found in Hans Sloane's Herbarium.

[3] The pastime became increasingly popular during the Victorian Era, where it played to the burgeoning interest in natural history and collection in general.

[5] These activities also afforded women the opportunity to display their understanding and appreciation of the natural world.

[8] These Victorian collections form valuable historical resources[9] for morphological studies and from which genomic DNA can be extracted.

You should have a pair of pliers; a pair of scissors; a stick like a common cedar "pen stalk," with a needle driven into the end of it, or, in lack of that, any stick sharpened carefully; two or three large white dishes, like "wash bowls" botanist's "drying paper;" or common blotting paper; pieces of cotton cloth, old cotton is the best; and the necessary cards or paper for mounting the plants on.

Three dried seaweed specimens arranged on an album page
Seaweed from Charles F. Durant’s Algae and Corallines of the Bay & Harbor of New York (1850). Clockwise from top: Ulva linza , Sargassum montagnei , and Polysiphonia nigrescens [ 1 ]
The title page from an 1848 Seaweed collection by Eliza A. Jordan of Brooklyn .
A white silhouette of pressed seaweed on a bright blue background. Written underneath the specimen is "Dictyota dichotoma in the young state and in fruit".
A photogram of Algae , made by Anna Atkins as part of her 1843 book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions , the first book composed entirely of photographic images.