The correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller: Christmasday ¶ 1886. ¶ Though this letter can only reach you so long after the chronologic anniversary, dear Mr Dyer, yet I must not let this festive time pass without bidding you all at Kew a happy n...

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Physical location:

RBG Kew, Kew Correspondence, Australia, Mueller, 1882-1890, ff. 210-212. 86.12.25a

Plant names

Candollea
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- Australian Plant Name Index
Dipteranthemum
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- Australian Plant Name Index
Gymnanthera nitida
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- Australian Plant Name Index
Ptilotus
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Todea
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Trichinium
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Preferred Citation:

Ferdinand von Mueller to William Thiselton-Dyer, 1886-12-25 [86.12.25a]. 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//letters/1880-9/1886/86-12-25a-final.odt>, accessed June 4, 2026

Christmasday

1886.

Stamped Royal Gardens Kew 7 Feb 1887 and annotated in purple pencil by ?Thiselton-Dyer And 9.2.87 [letter not found] and in lead pencil by Oliver D.O.

Though this letter can only reach you so long after the chronologic anniversary, dear Mr Dyer, yet I must not let this festive time pass without bidding you all at Kew a happy new year. Doubtless it will be again one of great and vast results for phytography which is indeed the stem of Botany, from which all the other branches of phytologic knowledge are nursed and ramifying. I wish particularly to Sir Jos Hooker at his now venerable age firmness of health; the younger workers are more sure of their blessing.

You have been so thoughtful of sending me extraprints of two plants from the “icons”, and I am glad that thus Australia is again represented in that important work.

Presumably Icones plantarum vol. 16, plates 1541 ( crosslandii, with a translation by Oliver of the description given by M in an unpublshed article, see discussion under B84.13.18), and 1545 ( , from North Australia and Qld as well as North Borneo, from which the specimen figured came).

In the 8th part of the Papuan plants I indicated Gymnanthera

Gymnanthera and new celastrinous have been underlined in red pencil, and a red pencil line across the central margin connects the beginning of the sentence The new celastrinous ... with the passage but there are no transits ... on the opposite page.

nitida for New Guinea.

B86.03.02, p. 46.

The new celastrinous genus, figured in the icones (of which series I get the successive parts from Dulau & Co regularly), seems to me chrysobalanous.

(This I think will not do . D.O.) interlined in lead pencil by Daniel Oliver above chrysobalanous. That so rare.

When Oliver described Plagiospermum sinense in vol. 16, plate 1526 he commented: ‘I have felt some little doubt as the affinity, whether with Rosaceae or Celestraceae, of this interesting plant in the absence of fruit’.

That so rare and remarkable a plant as is now fully brought by a picture before the botanic world is very pleasing; let me remark, that if and are to be kept apart, it would then be the latter (not the former) into which would fall, but there are no transits , as all the numerous - & -species have the sepals of equal length, or very nearly so; thus also the “facies” of Dipterantherum becomes very different.

In the text accompanying plate 1541, Oliver wrote: ‘Notwithstanding the extreme disparity in the length of the perianth-segments, upon which Sir. F. von Mueller grounds the genus , I think it might well have been assigned to ’.

It was lucky to find fruit in Kew [;] of course I did not like to destroy all specimens in search of it.

It was lucky ... search of it written in the left margin, f. 211 front, with its position in the text indicated by asterisks.

Do not be too hard on me, if I keep you waiting awhile with sendings for Kew; but I must first finish the “Key”;

B88.11.02.

and as the last spring was a favorable one for rain towards Central Australia, I was kept also very busy to name specimens from numerous Amateur-Collectors. And now it would seem, as if we were to have 3 great exhibitions of industrial products and educts all at once in Australia!

Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888; Centenary Universal Exhibition, Sydney, 1888; Jubilee International Exhibition, Adelaide, 1887.

I sent a few things to some institutions, whom I owed plants (dried specimens) , but there was nothing among them, that you had not already at Kew. Be sure that I shall make up for Kew some Papuan and other plants so soon as I can, without ruining my health entirely by almost want of any rest. The will be lifted Easter.

See M to W. Thiselton-Dyer, 2 October 1886 (in this edition as 86-10-02b).

Ever regardfully your

Ferd von Mueller

Kindly mention this to Prof Oliver -

Photogram for your kind acceptance in exchange of the one you sent some time ago.

'Kindly mention ... some time ago' written in the left margins of f. 211 front and f. 210 back.

Private

This postscript is filed as f. 212. It is placed here on the basis of the date-stamp Royal Gardens Kew 7. Feb. 1887 and the annotation by Thiselton-Dyer: And 9.2.87, the same date and annotation as on f. 210. It may however have been part of a second letter from M that Thiselton-Dyer received in the same mail. Priority is discussed again in the reply to the unfound letter from Thiselton-Dyer of 9 February; see M to W. Thiselton-Dyer, 30 March 1887.

Am afraid that I shall again upset the “mind” of one of your juniors, who wrote on this subject in a censuring tone “Gardeners Chronicle, a couple of years ago,

It is not clear why M thought that he would again ‘upset the mind’ of one of the younger Kew botanists, unless by this letter itself. M did use Candollea in B86.08.05 and B86.04.05, but without reiterating the brief argument in support of priority that he had made in his Systematic census (B83.03.04), pp. vii–viii, a position that Hemsley (1883) [signed W. B. H.] had censured in his review of it, quoting Bentham (1882) who considered strict priority to be ‘pedantry ... inconvenient to botanists ... detrimental to science’. Hemsley illustrated his critique by using the example of the confusion arising from M’s replacement of Stylidium by Candollea:

In 1805 Labillardière founded a genus Candollea; but he shortly discovered that Swartz had published the same genus under the name of Stylidium a few months before his appeared. Thereupon he proposed and described a second Candollea, a genus of Dilleniaceae. Now, Baron Mueller reduces, rightly or wrongly, the latter to Hibbertia, and he follows this up by deposing the Stylidium of Swartz in favour of the original Candollea, because Loureiro had previously (1790) published a genus Stylidium, which genus was afterwards unwittingly re-described as Marlea by Roxburgh. So this reform reinstates the first for what we have all our lives known as Stylidium; the plants we have called we should have to call Hibbertia; and our old coriaceous friend Marlea would become Stylidium. As long ago as 1838 the elder De Candolle was aware that Stylidium, Loureiro, was the same as Marlea, Roxburgh; yet as the former, though older, had not got into use, he would not adopt it in the place of a name that had become familiar in association with a certain plant.

See Loureiro (1790), vol. 1, p. 220; A. P. de Candolle (1838a), p. 332.

as if he had the experience of half a century upon him. No doubt young workers, who have the treasures of other peoples toil heaped commodiously up before them at a great and costly national establishment, can work under unparalleled advantages, though they may not always be impressive with that; at all events they seem very sparing in their remarks about the disadvantages of others, not so very favorably and luckily placed, nor do I see much mention made of the enormous exertions of the elder Hooker and his oldest friends, to build up for the grand benefit of the younger workers the vast material and the unique library which makes the work there so very easy now.

If exceptions are to be made in simple priority I should like to know; where such are to commence and where to end, and by what law they are to be governed.

On a strip of paper now glued to f. 212, Thiselton-Dyer asked: ‘What is all this about?’ Daniel Oliver(?) replied ‘ Mueller noticed the Business himself in the Gard. chron. [W] Hemsley thinks it [looks] apropos of something he had written very properly criticising F. v. M. who substitutes Candollea for Stylidium .’

No response by M to Hemsley (1883) has been found in the Gardeners’ chronicle in the relevant period. There was an anonymous review (Gardeners' chronicle, 22 April 1882, p. 529) of the earlier ‘Census of the genera’ (B82.13.08) where M had not made a great point of defending priority, merely listing the genera he recognised (see p. 218 for Candollea). The review stated:

Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, of Melbourne, has published a complete list of the genera of Australian plants, incuding those discovered since the publication of the Flora Australiensis, and the Cryptogams, including ‘Algs’ and ‘Fungs’. In this new example of the Baron's zeal and industry he has given credit to pre-Linnean authors for the genera established by them, thus Tribulus is referred to De l'Obel, Linum to Tournefort. Considering that the addition of an author's name is no mark of honour or distinction, but merely a means of facilitating reference and identification, it seems a pity to disturb the confessedly arbitrary arrangement which assigns to Linnaeus the establishment of the genera in question. At first sight it might seem that an injustice was done to earlier authors, but it is not really so, because in a monograph their names would be cited with the dates of publication. Shakspere [sic] founded many of his plays on prior legends, or even dramas, yet no one for general purposes cites any other authority for, say, Romeo and Juliet , than Shakspere. In historical dissertations, however, the sources of Shakspere's inspiration are very properly noted. …

M to the Gardeners' chronicle, July 1882 (in this edition as 82-07-00b; B82.08.03), appears to be a reaction to a review in Journal of Botany, vol .20, pp.156-7 (May 1882) which made similar points, although he may have had the above review in mind as well. In his rebuttal M focused on the inferred objection to ‘Algs’ and ‘fungs’, not on the reinstatement of the names of earlier authors.

It is possible that in recalling them Oliver (or Hemsley) had elided the two reviews, and probable that M had not responded to Hemsley (1883) in the Gardeners’ chronicle.