Question

[112]. Read the following passage carefully and answer the question.

Passage: The history of Indian science is incomplete without its women pioneers, who often worked without laboratories of their own, without encouragement and sometimes without pay. They taught in colleges, collected plant specimens on long field trips, calculated data by hand and published papers that later researchers built upon. Their success was rarely a single breakthrough. It was persistence: returning to the same experiment after failure, defending a result before sceptical colleagues, and mentoring younger students who followed. When a girl today opens a science textbook and finds only men's names, she receives a false picture. Restoring these pioneers to the story does more than correct history; it tells every student that science belongs to anyone willing to observe carefully and work honestly. In the context of the passage, the word 'specimen' most nearly means: