To William Branwhite Clarke   10 November 1863

Melbourne bot. Garden

10/11/63

Dear & Reverend friend

At the very first meeting of the Council of the Vict. R. S.1 after the receipt of your letter,2 I made your wishes known concerning Dr Haasts manuscript3 & the transactions of the Society. I received at once permission to transmit to you the former on loan and I was also instructed to send you a set of our transaction, of which one volume however is no longer available

The Council desires me to express their high gratification of this opportunity of testifying their ful appreciation of the eminent services, rendered by you in the cause of science during a long series of years in Australia, and beg of you to accept the assurance, that whenever it lies in their power, they will gladly aid your important researches.

The Council, well knowing the merits of your writings, wishes particularly to add any of your publications to the Royal Societys Library, if you should have a spare copy of any yet available. The parcel above referred to will be forwarded by the "Balclutha", which steamer is to proceed on her voyage on the 19. inst.

At the meeting when Mr Daintrees paper was read,4 there was a discussion in which Prof M'Coy took a share. On my suggestion an application has been made to your Government that we might be allowed to send one from our Geolog. Survey Department to complete the investigation of the fossil strata at Stony Creek,5 a matter in which no doubt you would afford your counsels & aid, altho’ it could not well be accomplished, on account of the expense it involves by private means.6 Sir Henry Barkly brought back a reply, that an offical answer would be transmitted to me, but as yet I received none, no doubt owing to the political turmoils in your colony7

Would it not be well for you to see the Minister of Lands on the Subject. Mr Daintrees paper was published immediately after its reading in the "Yeoman".8

Pray give my kind regards to Dr & Mrs Bennett & Mr and Mrs Moore, and believe me to be your

faithful friend

Ferd. Mueller

1
Royal Society of Victoria.
2
Letter not found.
3
Haast’s paper, ‘On the physical geography and Geology of New Zealand, principally in reference to the Southern Alps’, was read at the meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria on 26 May 1862. There was, however, a hiatus of several years in the publication of the Society’s Transactions at this period, and during this time Haast’s paper was lost; see Editor’s preface to Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, vol. 6, 1865, p. vi.
4
Daintree’s paper, ‘Geological notes, collected during a three months’ leave of absence spent in a trip from Melbourne to the Upper Burdekin, Queensland’, was read at the meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria on 10 August 1863 but was not published in the Transactions.
5
Probably the stream of that name, a tributary of the Genoa River, on the border between Vic and NSW.
6
Marginal note by Clarke (?) with its point of reference marked with a cross: It was proposed to me by Mr Daintree to do it [as a] joint expense — which I declined.
7
After a period of political instability in NSW, the third Cowper ministry fell on 15 October 1863 and a new ministry under James Martin took office.
8
Daintree’s paper was reported in Yeoman, and Australian acclimatiser (Melbourne), 15 August 1863, p. 715, and published in extenso in the issue for 29 August 1863, pp. 753-5.

Please cite as “FVM-63-11-10,” 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/63-11-10