Kew Novr. 20th 1860
Dear Dr Mueller
I have received two letters from you since my departure for Syria & return here.1 I have now returned & the first thing I did was to send to Pamplin the £65, that you sent me for R.S. membership. I quite expect that you will be elected this coming year & then the Secretary will communicate direct with you about the fees.
I wrote to you from Jerusalem2 asking your kind aid towards introducing Australian trees into Palestine, by sending seeds to Consul Finn, which would prove an immense boon to the country.
I only returned two days ago & have not yet had time to look over your many valued communications that have arrived since my departure, I am however especially glad to see that the excellent elaborate & careful Flora of Victoria3 is making good progress.
You will be glad to hear that a genuine Scientific Natural History Review is about to be established, in which Mr Oliver our active & talented Librarian at Kew undertakes the Editorship of Phænogamic Botany & Mr Currey the Cryptogamic two better men could not be found any-where — The Review will appear quarterly & will be invaluable; — it will contain a quarterly bibliography of immense value.4
My Father is remarkably well & is working as hard as ever at his Ferns: he takes immense interest in all your doings. Bentham has finished the mss of the Hong Kong Flora5 & printed down to end of Leguminosee.6 The first-volume of Grisebachs Flora has now appeared with Index of genera7 — It is most unlucky that he has followed an arrangement of the Orders of his own. I wish all would follow DC,8 not because it is necessarily the best, but because most do follow it, & all know how to find the orders by sequence without referring to the Index.
I am anxiously expecting your cases of plants by Sussex,9 & should be delighted to see Gahnia alive.
Ever, in haste
most truly yr
Jos. D Hooker.10
Gahnia
Leguminosee
Associated nowadays with this letter is a small square of blue paper, 11.6 cm wide by 9.0 cm deep, labelled 'For Dr. Mueller' with a pencil sketch, thus:
On the reverse is written: ''Ryssopterys australis is in the Hookerian Hb. from Cunningham (E. Coast, Trop.) and "Ryssopteris" is written on the label by Jussieu - but the species is not described by him — it appears to be a good species —‘
It is not clear in which letter from M's Kew correspondents this would have been included. Ryssopterys timorensis is discussed in M to G. Bentham, 20 February 1863 and G. Bentham to M, 25 April 1863. The only Australian species recognised by Bentham, Ryssopterys timorensis, is treated in Bentham (1863-78), vol. 1, p. 285, but neither R. australis nor R. tilaefolia (which M had mentioned in the letter of 20 February) is listed as a synonym.
Please cite as “FVM-60-11-20,” 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 27 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/60-11-20