The correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller: Melbourne bot. Garden, ¶ 9/9/66. ¶ ¶ By last mail, dear Dr Hooker, you will not have received my communications through the Colonial Office but by ordinary post, owing to the absense of Sir John Mann...

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Physical location:

RBG Kew, Kew correspondence, Australia, Mueller, 1858-70, f. 236. 66.09.09

Plant names

Aphelia
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Cyperus
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Melia Azedarach
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Salix Capensis
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Preferred Citation:

Ferdinand von Mueller to Joseph Hooker, 1866-09-09. R.W. Home, Thomas A. Darragh, A.M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D.M. Sinkora, J.H. Voigt and Monika Wells (eds), Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, <https://vmcp.rbg.vic.gov.au/id/66-09-09>, accessed April 20, 2025

MS annotation: 'Answd Nov 19/66'. Letter not found.

Melbourne bot. Garden,

9/9/66.

By last mail, dear Dr Hooker, you will not have received my communications through the Colonial Office but by ordinary post, owing to the absense of Sir John Manners-Sutton at the time of the departure of the mail. Thus it happens that a package of seeds, which was to go to Kew last month will only be sent now. The little which I enclose seems a South African species

a South African species interlined above new deleted.

and is under any circumstances an interesting addition to the N.Z. flora. Will you kindly cause the plant to be compared with existing species at Kew, and should it prove distinct cause the now transmitted diagnosis

Neither MS or published diagnosis has been found.

to be published in the L.S. proceedings or in Seemanns or the Edinburgh Journal. Should you offer any remarks, pray let them be worded so as to give me no pain. I must confess I could never write sentences such as occasionally occur in the Flora Austral, where in all eternity they will be now extant.

Bentham had undertaken to reflect, in Flora austrliensis, M's opinions where they differed from his own; see Lucas (2001). M may have been upset by comments such as 'P[ultenaea] filifolia F Muell. Fragm. i, 9, from Kangaroo Island, Bannier, appears to me to be a luxuriant form of P. tenuifolia with remarkably long slender leaves, but F. Mueller's herbarium only contains a single specimen past flower, scarcely sufficient for identification' (Bentham (1863-78), vol. 2, p. 140), but there were also positive comments such as 'under the name of A[cacia] longifolia, I have followed F. Mueller in including the following forms, which, different as they generally appear, are connected by such a gradual chain of intermediates that they cannot be separated by any positive characters ...' (Bentham (1863-78), vol. 2, p. 398).

Pray send the fungus herewith sent to Mr Smith.

See J. Hooker to M, 23 October 1866, and notes thereto.

Have you met in India or the Orient with a black fruited ? I have the plant in Steetz's Herbarium without special indication of locality, and it would be a vast improvement to the ordinary variety which in the vernal season here looks absolutely wretched with its dirty yellow-brown drupes.

What is ?

I am just publishing 2 new e

B89.12.03 lists only one described by M at this time: A. brizula, B66.12.04, p. 203.

There is no valediction; the text ends at the bottom of the sheet; part of the letter may be missing.