To Richard Owen1    25 March 1862

Melbourne bot & zool Garden

25/3/62

My dear Professor.

Since writing by the last monthly mail the large mass of meteoric iron from Cranbourne has by Mr Selwyns exertions been removed to Melbourne. Consequently no difficulty will be encountered in shipping it, should you now have decided on securing the whole for the British Museum.

As stated in a former letter,2 Prof McCoy has very kindly relinquished his claim on half the specimen, if the smaller meteor, transmitted to London by Mr Abel of Ballarat could be secured by the British Museum for remission to Melbourne.

Some of my scientific friends here have strongly urged the division of the large meteor, but I have regarded it my duty to protest formally on behalf of the British Museum to such a course, until we have learned your & Prof Maskelyne's decision.3

You will be sorry to learn, that our trial to send the Echidna home proved unsuccessful. Nevertheless, I am not discouraged, since the one animal reached the latitude of the Azores. I shall probably send an other pair by the 'Dover Castle' in a few days under the care of the Surgeon.

I may be in error, but I am under the impression, that the female never reached Europe.

Amongst the zoolog collections brought home by poor Elsey from tropical Australia was a little marsupial, which I caught in Central Australia on Sturts Creek. I secured carefully all its bones at the time, trusting that it might form an addition to the many new forms of marsupalia, elaborated by your immortal labours4

Ever with deep

veneration your

Ferd. Mueller

1
MS black edged; annotated by Owen: Echidna.
2
No letter to Owen with this statement has been found; but see M to N. Maskelyne, 20 February 1862.
3
See Lucas et al. (1994).
4
None of the marsupial specimens in the Natural History Museum presented by Elsey from the North Australia Exploring Expedition are stated to be from Sturt’s Creek; there is one without a specific locality, labelled Phascologale pirata (specimen 1857.10.24.14), which consists only of a skull and skeleton, but whose known distribution is the top end of the Northern Territory ( www.iucnredlist.org accessed 5 September 2011); if the skeleton belongs to P. tapoatafa, as the Natural History Museum now records it, the species' known range (Australian Faunal Directory, http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/abrs/online-resources/fauna/index.html (accessed 5 September2011) does not include Sturt’s Creek, nor any of the area through which the expedition sub-group that included M would have passed on its way to Sturt’s Creek. See also Lucas (2014).

Please cite as “FVM-62-03-25a,” 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 26 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/62-03-25a