Ferdinand von Mueller

Letter not found; item is a register entry only, recording the receipt of the letter by Bailey on 21 March 1882.

In his synoptic Systematic census of Australian plants (B83.03.04), M departed from the arrangement used in Bentham (1863-78) and Bentham & Hooker (1862-83), explaining that that arrangement was not ‘natural’ because it placed all plants without petals into Monochlamydeae whereas, M argued, 'so long as the Monochlamydeae remained isolated and associated with the Gymnospermeae, so long would we have an imperfect natural system’.  After giving some examples, he asserted that there was no 'real difficulty of finding for the rest of the Monochlamydeae proper places among naturally allied orders of supposed higher organisation. Nevertheless affinity is variously radial, not altogether uniserial, as beautifully demonstrated already by Linne in his map of ordinal alliances of plants, published by Fabricius and Giseke, or as lucidly exhibited as long ago as the middle of the last century by Bernard de Jussieu in the Royal Garden of Trianon, through arranging the plants in a class-ground, a method adopted in our Botanic Garden here also already in 1857’ (p. vi). Bailey consistently opposed this arrangement, and explicitly used the unmodified Bentham & Hooker sequence in Bailey (1883) and Bailey (1899-1905). M had wanted Bailey to follow his arrangement when publishing his Queensland floras, but the latter told Joseph Hooker on 20 February 1882 that ‘I told him [M] I liked the Gen. PI. as it was plain and that it was the same as used in all the Floras being published and I considered that to use any other arrangement would be unpardonable as it would lead to confusion’ and went further when writing to the collector Wilhelm Bäuerlin on 5 April 1893: 'You must see that all means are used [by Mueller] to throw discredit on Bentham's immortal work. This cannot last long and in a few years the system used by Baron M. in classifying will be forgotten the names restored to their proper place, and Melbourne herbarium arranged in accordance with the herbaria of other places of the globe.’ (Both quotations from Clements (1998); see also Maroske (2006)).