Ferdinand von Mueller

MS is bound with the proof mentioned. MS annotation by M: 'Answ 20/5/95'. Letter not found.

The date '1894' is printed as part of the letterhead. M's annotation suggests that the letter was written in 1895 and that Petrie forgot to alter the printed date. So, too, does the fact that Woolls's paper was not read to the Victoria Insitute until 21 January 1895 (Journal of the transactions of the Victoria Institute, vol. 32 (1900), p. 106).

Woolls (1900), published together with the discussion it engendered at the meeting at which it was read.

See B00.13.01, printed following the discussion engendered by Woolls's paper.

Woolls died on 14 March 1893. The proof bound with the present letter is annotated in an unknown hand on p. 1: 'on pp 2 & 3 are two of the so called errors we are told that there are other errors which he would not have left uncorrected and the Council were anxious his greatest friend should correct them all'. On p. 2, Woolls refers to W. Dampier's herbarium which he says 'is still preserved at Oxford and contains forty specimens, eighteen of which are figured in his Voyage (vol. III, ed. 1709), though few of them with the exception of Colutea Novae Hollandiae (Now Clianthus Dampieri), can be identified.' This sentence is marked by a line and '?' in the margin. On p. 3 Woolls refers to Joseph Banks's will in which he says Brown [i.e. Robert Brown (1773-1858)] was bequeathed 'an annuity of £200, and also the use and enjoyment during his life of the library, herbarium, manuscripts, drawings, &c. He also bequeathed to F. Bauer (the eminent artist and companion of Brown who had been in Sir Joseph's employment for thirty years) an annuity of £300 on condition of his continuing to delineate the flowers at Kew.' A line and '?' straddles these two sentences in the margin. No other queries are marked, but later in the MS there are ticks in the margin beside several references to M's work. The artist is Ferdinand Bauer

In the published version of the paper, the passage referring to Dampier appears unchanged, while the second marked passage has undergone two extremely minor changes that do not affect the sense in any way. The paper also includes (p. 146) an acknowledgment: 'P.S. — Mr. Aird, of Sydney, has kindly made some corrections in the proof, consequent on the death of the learned author of the paper. — Ed.'.

In his commentary on Woolls's paper, p. 145, M explicitly declined to offer any corrections:

I might have been tempted to exercise some censorship on his communcation to the Victoria Institute, had the lamented author (in a wish, as he wrote to me at the time, to pass an eulogium) not refrained from placing the manuscript before me, so that it will be best not to correct the minor inaccuracies which occur, more especially so as his essay will have been before a meeting of the Institute prior to this lengthened corollary, now supplied as desired, can reach London...

In the bound collection (C32) of Woolls's papers in the Library, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, there is a second, unmarked set of proofs of this paper, to which has been added a typeset note recording Woolls's death. This note was not included in the final published version of the paper.