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Historians of science have long treated nineteenth-century botanical illustrations as straightforward records of nature, valued mainly for their accuracy. Historian Mirela Osei challenges this view. After examining hundreds of plates produced for European herbaria, she found that illustrators rarely drew a single specimen exactly as it lay before them. Instead, they combined the flower of one plant with the leaves of another and the root of a third, sometimes even adding features taken from written descriptions of plants they had never seen. The resulting images, Osei argues, were fundamentally __: rather than reproducing any one plant, they brought together scattered observations into an idealized type that no actual specimen could match.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

A) spurious
B) synthetic
C) derivative
D) provisional

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