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Rh Southern and Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée companies. The Canal du Midi traverses the south of the department for 44 m. and terminates at Cette. The Canal des Étangs 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, Béziers, Lodève and St Pons, with 36 cantons and 340 communes.

Montpellier, Béziers, Lodève, Bédarieux, Cette, Agde, Pézenas, Lamalou-les-Bains and Clermont-l’Hérault 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-Désert, 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.

HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES, 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 début as a lawyer at the Châtelet, and delivered some very successful speeches; later he was avocat général 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. Hérault’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. Hérault, 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 Hérault 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 ), 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, Hérault 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 Hérault, 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 Hérault 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 Hérault, 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 à Montbard, published by A. Aulard (Paris, 1890); A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1906); J. Claretie, ''Camille Desmoulins ... étude sur les'' Dantonistes (Paris, 1875); Dr Robinet, Le Procès des Dantonistes (Paris, 1879); “Hérault de Séchelles, sa première mission en Alsace” in the review La Révolution Française, tome 22; E. Daudet, ''Le Roman d’un conventionnel. Hérault de Séchelles et les dames de'' Bellegarde (1904). His &OElig;uvres littéraires were edited (Paris, 1907) by E. Dard.

HERB (Lat. herba, grass, food for cattle, generally taken to represent the Old Lat. forbea, Gr. , pasture, , 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 and ).

HERBARIUM, or, 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 Göttingen has had bequeathed to it the largest collection (exceeding 40,000 specimens) ever made by a single individual—that of Professor Grisebach. At the