Newyear,
1881.
Let me offer to you, reverend and venerable Sir, my best felicitation at this anniversary.
May the new year be to you and your family one of happiness, health and prosperity
under divine blessings, and may it have many others of joyfulness in its sequence
for you.
Though you have been rarely favored by providence in granting you bodily and mental
vigor to a late autumn of life, yet your real winter days — I trust — are still remote
for final glorious repose.
Chevreul continues his regular lectures as Professor of organic chemistry still in
Paris, though 93 old; and Miers worked away microscopically — as you are well aware
— on South American plants up to his 90 years! So, I trust, science will derive yet
many years advantage from your unrivalled talents and experience in mycology.
I am especially much beholden to you for the labor, bestowed on my collections of
fungi, through which now the number of species (those of New Zealand excluded) have
advanced to 750, as an Index proves, written on my solicitation by Mr Cooke, though
in his list he has only gone over the
of your vast collection, the index of the other great tribes being left incomplete.
The harvest in new fungi seems so rich yet, compared to that of Mono- and Di- cotyledoneae
in Australia, that I could readily be fascinated into mycologic studies, if I had
a good collection of books & specimens here for comparison, which I have not, and
which at my time of life and with my worldly means I shall never have.
Though, as you desire, my immediate communications will henceforth for mycology chiefly
[be]
with Mr Cooke, I shall regard it always a high privilege to be allowed to communicate
with so great a master in the knowledge of acotyledonous plants as yourself.
Pray remember me to your kind Lady, and let me express my sympathy with her in her
illness, from which I hope she has meanwhile fully recovered.
Ever with grateful and regardful remembrance your
Ferd. von Mueller.
I shall look forward to your new contribution to Austral fungi with deep interest.
I read today once more the touching preface, which Fries gave on his 81 birthday to
his
Europaei, in which he say so justly & beautifully asserts, that it is only you, who
can give us the "
extra-europaei."
