Melbourne bot. & zool Garden,
18 oct 58.
My dear Prof. Asa Gray
I beg to express my gratitude for your generosity of sending me so many valuable and highly interesting publications, doubly esteemed as coming out of your hands. I trust young Australia will imitate the noble zeal of your vigorous nation to promote with the same freshness of life the prosecution of science. The "Red Jacket" has reached a day or two ago this port again, but just as the mail is leaving I am unable to learn more than that my box destined for you did not share the fate of some other part of the Cargo, which was consumed by fire.
I shall lay regularly plants & pamphlets as well for yourself as for the Smithsonian Institute and for your friend aside, and will send a consignment with every Boston vessel returning to your shores direct.
Pray my dear Prof Asa Gray, do not distress you about a return so very soon, but when even without extra-labour & quite conveniently to your self it can be done. Your U.S. Lithographics1 are magnificent. I wished we could equally well illustrate here. The seeds kindfully sent this time arrived in excellent order and are in the forcing ground now.
I will gladly send such Australian Compositae to you as I can hunt up. I enclose the male & female plant of Dr. Hookers Raoulia Tasmanica. Our mutual friend evidently is not aware of the plant being dioecious, altho' I have when referring it in 1854 (phil. transact. vol 1 (1854-1855) p.45.2 to Antennaria as Antenn. nubigena I gave that character. In Sir Will. Hookers reprint3 the sectional Character, published by me is omitted. It is as follows: Actina: "Scales of involucre radiating. Heads of fertile plant with several rows of female flowers in circumference and with hermaphrodite ones in the centre. Heads of the sterile plants with only hermaphrodite flowers, a few rarely fertile. Pappus at the extremity clavellate, with exception of that of the female flowers which is not thickened." I think Raoulia is fully referable to Antennaria.
The mail just closing disables me, to write fully, this time, all my correspondence being thrown on the last day in consequence of a large exhibition of the Hortic. Society4 here yesterday.
With the sincerest wishes for your welfare
your very humble
Ferd. Mueller.
Compositae
Raoulia Tasmanica
Antennaria nubigena
Please cite as “FVM-58-10-18a,” 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 23 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/58-10-18a