From Joseph Hooker   24 December 1862

Decr. 24/62

Dear Dr Mueller

I write a few lines to thank you again for the 2d & 3d of exchanges, first duly received & acknowledged some weeks ago.1 Pamplin has also written in your name that the binding bill should be transferred to your acct. if your Establishment pays. I can have no objection to this as it was a private affair between you & Henslows family so far as I was concerned, I was most anxious that you should not think the lot a shabby one!2

I am now doing Combretaceae, having just begun, & find little novelty except your fine thing which I have not looked at yet but which I cannot doubt is a noble & excellent good genus, I am glad you have described it — the Fragmentum with it has not come to hand yet.3

I am sending you some good odds & ends of duplicate plants through Pamplin which will I hope prove useful to you. Bentham will arrange about copies of Gen. Plant.4 I have made a frightful blunder in Zieria where I say "Australiae tropicae & subtropicae orient. incolae"5 — for tropicae read temperatae of course. Bentham is working desperately hard on the Flora.

My Father is remarkably well, as busy as ever with his Ferns, I with Welwitschia 6 & "Genera Plantarum" — he is counting on the unrivalled wood of Victoria from the Exhibition.7

Ever dear Mueller most ty yrs

Jos D Hooker

 

Col. Munro, writes me word that the exquisite grass you wrote about & enclosed8 (like a Lappago) is a totally new form of Panicum for which he proposes the mss name pachy[g]luma but he does this in ignorance that you will probably publish it (he will not so there is no fear of your clashing.) I am writing to him & will tell him you will publish it under what name you think proper in the Fragmenta probably.9 - I have not hunted for it through the Herb. but could not find it in Panicum or Paspalum.

 

Combretaceae

Lappago

Panicum pachygluma

Paspalum

Welwitschia

Zieria

 
1
The boxes of Herbarium specimens sent to Kew for Bentham’s use while writing Flora Australiensis. See J Hooker to M, 11 April 1862.
2
M was purchasing some items from the library of J. S. Henslow, and Hooker arranged with M’s agent, Pamplin, for a run of journals to be bound; see J. Hooker to M, 11 April 1862.
3
Macropteranthes leichhardtii (B62.09.01, p. 91), see M to G. Bentham, 24 September 1862. Hooker was the author of the Combretaceae in Bentham & Hooker (1862-83), vol 1, pt. 2, pp. 684-90.
4
Bentham & Hooker (1862-83).
5
Bentham & Hooker (1862–83), vol 1, pt. 1, p. 291.
6
See J. Hooker to M, 20 September 1862.
7
That is, to receive for Kew the woods exhibited at the London International Exhibition 1862. See M to W. Hooker, 20 December 1862.
8
See J. Hooker to M, 20 September 1862.
9
M published the grass as Panicum munroi (B66.12.04, p. 204).

Please cite as “FVM-62-12-24,” 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 25 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/62-12-24