To Joseph Hooker   15 November 1859

Melbourne bot. & zool

Garden, 15 Nov. 59

My dear Dr Hooker.

I cannot express to you how sorry I felt to hear of the long sufferings of your very venerable father, receiving only of his illness information yesterday by your & Dr Harveys letters.¹ Altho' I had never the good fortune & enjoyment to [near] myself personally to him, nor even possess what I often endeavoured to obtain, his portrait, — yet his [manner], his works, his attachment to friends, his encouragement to followers of his path, are always as an ideal before my mind, & all that may afflict the venerable sage will have a still deeper echo in my heart, than the enjoyments which I feel with & for him. — May he be led to full health again & be long spared us yet! —

Let me thank you for your kind attention to my wishes, altho' they have been but partially realized. I have placed £1000 on the estimates of my department for the elaboration of an Universal Australian Flora in 1860 & trust the sum will be granted. There are also £320 for enabling me to go on with the illustration[s] of the plants of Victoria of which now 27 are ready, illustrating as many orders. Had it not been for the necessity of retaining a fixed appointment here, which I cannot hold, when going to Europe, and that hereditary tuberculosis banished me from my lovely native country (both my parents having died early of pulmonary consumption), I would have responded to your fathers call & have come long since to Kew. Having no private property of freehold, & all I had since the last 20 years expended in my library & collections, it was even disregarding my health a too venturesome undertaking.

However the Flora is now in the hands of the best botanist for such a purpose & shall have my disinterested support, & whilst I am here keeping up a correspondence with very many collectors & am directing their labours, I may furnish, — si fata relint — yet many additional contribution. The 8 No of my Fragmenta² is a proof of this.³ I shall of course steadily proceed with "the plants of Victoria" and the "Fragmenta" and the former will probably always be ahead of Mr Bentham's works so that my views of orders, genera & species can always be consulted by Mr Bentham before, Brown's species having to be reduced by 1/4 or 1/3! The proof sheets will be by every mail in Kew. I have finished now the Droseraceae, — It may not be out of place once more to remind Mr Bentham, that the Flora should not embody any synonymns unless they were published with diagnosis. That in my conception is the grand distinction which should be drawn between admissable and unaceptable synonymy.

I have lately received valuable contributions from the active & generous Drs Asa Gray, H[eward]⁴ & Mr Thwaites,⁵ which have permitted me in some instances to examine critically some of my northern plants. A very much greater aid an aid which I will publicly acknowledge, will be to me your index of Indo-Australian plants,⁶ in publishing some of my manuscripts. I have from Dr Milligan received lately a specimen of R. nanus; it is in my humble opinion a pygmy state of Ranunculus lappaceus. The latter is probably the same as R. aureus Schleicher, which I have however not in fruit. Would you not compare it with your specimens. It may finally settle the question, whether the species is or is not cosmopolitan. Browns Hydrocotyle vulgaris is evidently H. interrupta Muehlen[berg]. You will have observed by last letters, that I transferred the dubious plant of Balanophorae to Loranthaceae.⁷

With my best wishes for Sir William and yourself & an ardent desire often to hear of you, I remain, my dear Dr Hooker,

your truly attached

Ferd. Mueller

I have now Mr Stuarts plants from the N.W. interior of South Australia before me; and will report thereon. It contains 12 new species and one or two genera. A remarkably beautiful & singular Goodeniais amongst them.⁸

Balanophorae

Droseraceae

Goodenia

Hydrocotyle interrupta

Hydrocotyle vulgaris

Loranthaceae

Ranunculus aureus

Ranunculus lappaceus

Ranunculus nanus