Ferdinand von Mueller

Letter not found. The text given here is from 'Kinney's Eucalyptus', Los Angeles herald, 11 October 1896, p. 5 (B96.09.03). The letter is introduced with the following text: 'The following letter addressed to Mr. Abbot Kinney from Baron Ferd. von Mueller, the recognized authority on the eucalyptus, is the most valuable appreciation of Mr. Kinney’s lately published work'. Kinney (1895) was not published until mid-1896; Pacific rural press, 18 July 1896, p. 1, refers to the work as 'just published', and it was entered into the Library of Congress on 6 August 1896 (see i mage of that copy). However, M had had a stroke on 24 September 1896. The only four letters known from after that were dictated and this letter is very unlikely to have been written at that time. Moreover, even on the fastest steamers plying the Australia to San Francisco route, if M had written this on 29 September 1896, it could not have reached California in time to be published on 11 October. The publication M referrs to is almost certainly Kinney (1895a), one of four essays in a US Department of Agriculture, Division of Forestry Bulletin, that could not have been published before August 1895. The volume also contains an essay on Acacia by another author, and it is very unlikely that M would not also have made at least a passing reference to that in his letter, so it is probable that he was referring to a preprint of Kinney's text. It is also unlikely that M would have been so fulsome in his praise of Kinney's longer work, which was subject to a scathing review by Burtt-Davy (1896), published in December 1896. The letter is therefore dated to 1895.