To Augustus Gregory   3 October 1857

Melbourne bot Garden

3. Oct. 1857.

Dear Mr Gregory,

I am intruding with these lines on you, to hear if you think you could spare a few of your precious hours for some brief information on the physical geography of West Australia. My paper for the Institute has been fixed for November, and I should be proud to introduce any of your observations in it.1

The South Australian Explorers seem to have done comparitively, little but I am not yet in possession of particulars about Mr Hacks route.2

My letter in reply to your kind letter of last month,3 in which you expressed your intention to take the field again4 and to serve simultaneously bot. science has, I hope, arrived.

Goyders fresh water seas seem to have vanished in miarage5

Believe me, dear Sir

to be your most attached

Ferd. Mueller

B58.05.03, which was read before the Philosophical Institute of Victoria on 25 November 1857.
Stephen Hack travelled for three months through the dry country south and west of Lake Gairdner, SA, in 1857. See Threadgill (1922) pp. 32-5.
Letters not found.
Leichhardt Search Expedition, 1858.
George Goyder, Assistant Surveyor of South Australia, travelled to the north of the Flinders Ranges in 1857 and found the supposed Lake Torrens of Eyre to contain fresh water. He was in fact on the southern shore of Lake Blanche; Eyre's 'Horseshoe Lake', Lake Torrens, was shown by Gregory in 1858 to be Lakes Blanche and Callabonna, when he rode between them unimpeded. See Threadgill (1922) pp. 5-7, 15-17.

Please cite as “FVM-57-10-03,” in Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, edited by R.W. Home, Thomas A. Darragh, A.M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D.M. Sinkora, J.H. Voigt and Monika Wells accessed on 28 March 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/57-10-03