Ferdinand von Mueller

Letter not found.

Macleay (1887), read on 24 February 1886, described the Coleoptera 'collected during the Australian Geographical Society's expedition to the Fly River, New Guinea during the winter months of last year' (i.e. 1885) on p. 136, but at the end of the paper wrote that he would not proceed with the description of the more than 60 species of Phytophagi in the collection since 'I find that Mr Martin Jacoby is now engaged upon the "Descriptions of the new genera and species of the Phytophagus Coleoptera of the Indo-Malayan and Austro-Malayan subregions, contained in the Civic Museum of Genoa," and as that museum ... [holds] the insects taken by Signor [Luigi Maria] D'Albertis on the Fly River, ... [and] if I proceed with my present work, Mr Jacoby and I would be, in many cases, describing the same insects' (p. 204). Jacoby (1884) is the first of a series of papers under the title given by Macleay. The present letter almost certainly refers to collections made during the 1887 expedition led by Walter Cuthbertson, who returned to Melbourne on 21 October (Argus, 24 October 1887, p. 6). No paper by Macleay on the insects of this expedition appeared in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales. M sent at least some of the collection to London; see Distant (1888).