25, WILTON PLACE, S.W.
London
May 25/64
My dear Sir
Since I last wrote, the last two boxes of Myrtaceae per Essex and Great Britain have arrived safely, so that now I have received all that you have announced It will be better not to send any more just yet as the Myrtaceae will occupy me till the end of the year.
I shall certainly not include Euphorbiaceae in Calyciflorae1 — we follow in the main the arrangement of De Candolle who with the greater number of botanists place Euphorbiaceae amongst Monochlamydeae — with the full understanding that the names of these great divisions are not to be taken as expressive of a positive character — and although Euphorbiaceae often have petals, still their general tendency is to be without, especially in one of the sexes, and in other respects they show a reduced organisation in the flowers.
Two cases containing the remainder of your Papilionaceae and Caesalpinieae were shipped by the Sussex which sailed last week. You will no doubt receive from Kew this mail the bill of lading.
I have just heard from Mr Sargeant that he has received from your Government, a bill for the £100 for the 2d vol. which will be due on the 20th June when he will pay me the money so that that is now all right, with many thanks.
The two Caesalpinieae which you sent are undoubtedly Pterolobium and I believe P. lacerans — upon a hasty look it seemed to me as if the loose tomentose leaflets of one specimen did not belong, but I have not examined them yet — I had already inserted the genus Pterolobium but without identifying the species for 2 leaves in your collection from Dallachy did not seem to be referrable to anything else. I shall now I hope be able to fix the species
I had thought about including Norfolk Island,2 but on consultation with the Hookers it was thought as well to omit it — it would have required a separate heading as it could not be included in either of the other colonies — and there is very little to add to Endlicher's Flora.3 I included Lord Howe's Island because its plants have never been enumerated.
I am almost overwhelmed with the Acacias I have found it necessary carefully to reexamine every species and variety not relying upon my own previous analyses, generally again soaking the flowers. I have been able to reduce many species besides those you have brought together in which with few exceptions I have followed you but still the number is enormous. I have already finished 230 phyllodineous species and have about 20 more still to do besides the compound ones. The synoptically tabulating this great mass without positive sectional characters has been very hard work, and takes up quite as much time as examining and describing. The copying out and revising for press which I do in the evenings keeps pretty well pace with the rough work, and as soon as the few remaining Acacias are done I shall begin printing which cannot be now above ten days or fortnight hence. I believe after all the vol. will stop short of Myrtaceae.4
I should be very sorry you should diminish your dependence on R. Brown.5 No one botanist however eminent has been found to be so uniformly accurate in every one of his works great and small except only that Appendix to Sturt — the only thing he ever wrote in a hurry, and with perhaps a little animus which it is useless to allude further to he forgot his usual caution before publishing.6 Still as to Clidanthera he was quite right — it is nearer to Psoralea than to Indigofera — but quite distinct if it were only for the remarkable anthers from which he derived his name. 7 If it did not occur to him to compare it with Glycyrrhiza where the same anthers occur, it is because the latter is a genus which he had never had occasion to examine or study and no one else had observed the peculiarity. So that here again he was not in error. And it is on account of this universal accuracy that I cannot by reducing Pentadynamis to Crotalaria, convict him of such gross mistakes as stamina diadelpha carina obtusa and legumen compressum without having seen the very specimen he examined. Unfortunately the parcel of Sturt's plants on which he based his paper cannot be now found, and Pentadynamis must remain a puzzle if not a myth.
Zornia chaetophora has longer hairs to the fruit than any other variety of Z. diphylla I have seen, but those hairs or bristles are so variable in their absence presence or length in other forms that I cannot but consider this as an extreme one.8
Yours very sincerely
George Bentham
Dr F. Mueller
Acacia
Caesalpinieae
Calyciflorae
Clidanthera
Crotalaria
Euphorbiaceae
Glycyrrhiza
Indigofera
Monochlamydeae
Myrtaceae
Papilionaceae
Pentadynamis
Psoralea
Pterolobium lacerans
Zornia chaetophora
Zornia diphylla
See M to G. Bentham, 12 December 1863, and Maroske (2006).
See M to G. Bentham, 13 February 1864.
Endlicher (1833).
See G. Bentham to M, 24 December 1863.
Bentham is probably responding to a comment about Robert Brown (1773-1858) in M to G. Bentham, 13 February 1864.
R. Brown (1849). Bentham is almost certainly referring to Brown's comment regarding Sturt's collection of plants, that 'In regard to such forms as appear to constitute genera hitherto undescribed, it greatly exceeds the much more extensive herbarium, collected by Sir Thomas Mitchell in his last expedition, in which the only two plants proposed as in this respect new, belong to genera already well established, namely, Delabechia to Brachychiton, and Linschotenia to Dampiera'. Cf. Mitchell (1848), pp. 155, 345. In his Preface to this work, Mitchell acknowledged help with the botany from Bentham, William Hooker, John Lindley and Willem de Vriese: the description of Delabechia was due to Lindley, that of Linschotenia to de Vriese.
See G. Bentham to M, 19 November 1863 (in this edition as 63-11-19), and M to G. Bentham, 13 February 1864.
See M to G. Bentham, 13 February 1864.
Please cite as “FVM-64-05-25,” 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