To William Hooker   24 February 1865

24/2/65

 

It affords me, dear Sir William, great pleasure to offer you a few interesting contributions to your fern memoranda. Cyathea medullaris has been found in Australia! It is a most reliable scientific observer, who brought it from the Cape Otway Ranges1 & there it is consociated with the, as we thought, endemic New Zealandian Aspidium hispidum! You will further note, that Marattia salicina has been gathered, as far as I am aware, for the first time in Australia, at Rockingham Bay. I have no doubt, that the N.E. coast, which Mr Dallachy now vigorously explores, is rich in Indian ferns, not yet known as Australian.

But that we can add to our few tree-ferns the noble Cyathea has been quite charming to me.

The Great Meteorite for Prof. Maskelyne is gone by the Red Rover to the British Museum.2

The Ladies Committee, 16 Ladies delegated by the 8 great religious sections, is constituted.3 So a romantic & novel enterprise of the noblest kind will be instituted, and as a little tribute of the Ladies Expedition towards science we may expect to receive some plants. The whole scientific & intellectual world will watch the Ladies work & her emissary with deep interest. I am glad I succeeded; it was a bold step & will now probably for other grand philanthropic objects find imitation. I will send the papers bearing on the undertaking from time to time.

I am glad that your fern work, the great epitome of all knowledge of the system of ferns,4 is proceeding under your never tiring care. What a permanent boon to science such a work will be!

The sporangia of Platyzoma break easily off, and I do not see them so regularly distributed as in some other Gleicheniae, where they form — if we like to call them so — sori. But this of course is no character in the Niphobolus section of Polypodium.

I can see nothing but spores surrounding the sporangia & not a distinct powdery mass. I am grateful that I shall have the ferns again; and hope that the advantage of obtaining notes for your work will be in proportion to the trouble it involved to revise them.5

With veneration

your

Ferd Mueller

 

Aspidium hispidum

Cyathea

Cyathea medullaris

Gleichenia

Marattia salicina

Niphobolus

Platyzoma

Polypodium

1
Vic.
2
See Lucas et al. (1994).
3
The Ladies' Leichhardt Search Committee.
4
W. Hooker & Baker (1865-8). Only Part 1 of the work was published, on 24 July 1865, before Hooker's death on 12 August 1865.
5
A collection of ferns had been sent to Kew in April 1863 (M to W. Hooker, 15 April 1863, and M notebook recording despatch of plants to Kew for Flora australiensis,RB MSS M44, Library, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne),and was received back in Melbourne by the time that M wrote to Hooker on 25 March 1865. See also M to W. Hooker, 24 November 1864, for an apology for sending the specimens unsolicited.

Please cite as “FVM-65-02-24c,” 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 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/65-02-24c