Kew October 10th 1857.
My dear Dr Mueller
Since I last had the pleasure of addressing you,
my Father has received the very splendid & most interesting collections of N. Australian
plants which you have sent to Kew, & which have given the greatest satisfaction. They
are in all respects better than could possibly have been expected & we are quite at
a loss to imagine how you could have managed to collect so much & preserve so well
on so hazardous & fatiguing an expedition. Your valuable & extensive Mss
have also all arrived in perfect safety, & we have published several of your new
genera in the last number of the Journal,
together with the exceedingly interesting new Van Diemens land plants whose descriptions
you send.
It is now mainly on the subject of the remainder of your mss that I would address
you. These have all been sorted as they arrive, & you will find them in perfect order,
but their excessive bulk, amounting now to several foolscap reams render it quite
impossible for any one to do much with them but yourself. The verifying your new genera
is a work of much greater labor than you suppose; & you must not be surprized to hear
that some of them are common & well known Indian genera & even species. Thus not I
assure you from want of will on my Fathers & my parts, that we do not publish more
of your mss; but from want of time, & on my own part at any rate who am engaged on
the Tasmanian Flora & the Indian
much averseness to committing both yourself & myself by publishing old plants as
new — You have also I think proposed several different plants under the same name
for some of the more important genera named after the Colonial Governors, some new
& some old, & this complicates the matter very much. Want of time is however the main
evil on our parts, for you must recollect, that besides our own duties & our own scientific
works, we have correspondents like circumstanced with yourself
all over the world;
all requiring more or less of our time. — Another matter that makes a material difference
is, that the Journal of Botany is to be discontinued this year,
& we shall not have the facility for publishing your mss that we had. It is true
that the Linnaean Society publishes & would most gladly receive contributions, but
it requires that papers laid before it be strictly scrutinized by referees, & they
would not feel themselves justified in publishing any quantity of new genera & species
that had not been compared with an extensive and well named Herbarium. Still I shall
endeavour to make a good communication to that Society in your name,
& indeed have long been intending to carry out your often expressed wish in this
matter; but the Kew Journal has hitherto required all that I could supply of your
materials with care. — With regard to your paper on
, de Vries has left Europe for Java & so his Journal has come to a close
& indeed I think that when you come to Kew & see how the
have been done by our excellent friend de Vries, you will approve of our decision
to withold your mss till your arrival
here. The fact is that de Vries monograph
is a most unfortunate attempt, it includes
& even a Rubiaceous plant besides numerous wrong identifications, so that any comment
upon it
made without access to the materials upon which he worked
, cannot but add to the confusion he has already made. In systematic Botany even the
best Botanists are often at fault & I find it impossible to identify many of Brown's
described Tasmanian plants without access to his specimens. The
especially have cost me many weeks of labor, your specimens have been invaluable,
though like my own, often wrong-named. The N. Zealand
which you write to me about, is one out of many cases in point; it is certainly Brown's
plant, though I shd [not]
have known it any more than you did, but for his specimens & so [with]
many
others. The long & short of the matter is that Systematic Botany is a much more laborious
& critical operation than any one conceives who has not access to a large Herbm &
Library & the quantity of scattered dismembered materials in the shape of genera &
species now daily being further & more widely scattered through periodicals of all
kinds, threatens to render the effectual study of species impossible at no distant
period. Systematic monographs & Floras are what are now wanted & we do look with the
greatest anxiety to your visiting England & throwing your magnificent materials into
a connected whole. I am striving to do this for the Indian Flora, & Dr Harvey is going
to begin the South African
& all I can say is that you shall [have]
every assistance for the Australian that we can command. Meanwhile you may depend
that we shall loose no opportunity of keeping your labors before the public eye &
I shall make a point of getting up the paper for the Linnæan from your materials which
you are anxious about, & present it in your name altogether. Your collections are
nearly all arranged in the Herbarium & are being poisoned as they are entered; it
is impossible to exaggerate their value.
I asked you in my last whether you had seen my friend Frederick Adamson in Melbourne,
a very old & valued pupil of my Father's & an excellent collector, very fond of Botany
indeed.
I am now printing the Tasmanian orchids & have nearly completed the mss of the Monocotyledons
there is a very great difficulty in the
&c &c which I hope I have unravelled. Brown's
is I think not Labillardieres. — Your & Brown's? C. Filum is Labills
. Browns
are very confused, several
Restios
&
Leptocarpi
being sexes of one species as you have detected in
Lept: simplex
&
I think.
But I must break off as it is post time.
Believe me ever
most truly yours
Jos D Hooker
