From William Hooker¹    2 February 1856

Royal Gardens, Kew

Feb. 2. 1856.

My dear Dr Mueller,

Where or when this will reach your hands, I do not know: — but I send it through the best channel, through the Colonial Office. I wish you to see that we are doing the best we can to bring your exertions & important labors in the cause of science into notice. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr Labouchere, highly approves of my publishing notices from the communications I receive from you relating to your success & progress, & I send him & other official people (Sir W. Denison for example) copies as they appear. Dr Hooker & I are thus issuing 2 series, if I may so say, of your labors, I. the new & rare Victoria Plants,² & 2. the particulars, or rather generalizations of your North-western journies.³ And with such we have begun the new vol. of the Journal of 1856, & shall continue to do so as health & time & the information we receive from you, may allow.

I should be deeply sorry if anything should prevent your visit to Europe soon after the present Explorations are finished. Should your worst fears be realized, viz that the absence of high mountains may occasion a scanty vegetation or a vegetation analogous to adjacent intra-tropical & maritime regions: yet the geographical limits or distribution, subjects that you never neglect,⁴ — & your great ardour & enthusiasm which will leave no species, phanerogam or Cryptogam, uncollected & unrecorded: — all this must lead to very important results: & it is no small matter in your favor that you are so familiar with the vegetation of the extreme South of the same island (for you are on one & the same piece of circumscribed insulated ground), — that you have yourself touched here & there on the East coast, that much of the west is familiar to you by Drummond & Preiss &c — & now you are in the extreme north of that fine, immense island! Let me say too that the few plants I have from Stokes (gathered by Bynoe) are new & curious: & the interior plants will be found more peculiar than the coast ones. God grant you health & freedom from accidents & I have no fear of your success. — Your collections, from the mouth of the Victoria river, as you were on the point of landing, have all come safe & were immediately dispatched here by the Secretary of the Colonies, & are undergoing as careful an investigation as will be necessary to make such a Report as shall be sufficiently free from errors without abstracting from the novelty of your undertaking on your visit to Europe.

With the heartiest good wishes from Dr Hooker and myself,

believe me,

your faithful & affecte

W. J. Hooker.