To Joseph Hooker1    9 September 1866

Melbourne bot. Garden,

9/9/66.

By last mail, dear Dr Hooker, you will not have received my communications through the Colonial Office but by ordinary post, owing to the absense of Sir John Manners-Sutton at the time of the departure of the mail. Thus it happens that a package of seeds, which was to go to Kew last month will only be sent now. The little Cyperus which I enclose seems a South African species2 and is under any circumstances an interesting addition to the N.Z. flora. Will you kindly cause the plant to be compared with existing species at Kew, and should it prove distinct cause the now transmitted diagnosis3 to be published in the L.S. proceedings or in Seemanns or the Edinburgh Journal. Should you offer any remarks, pray let them be worded so as to give me no pain. I must confess I could never write sentences such as occasionally occur in the Flora Austral, where in all eternity they will be now extant.4

Pray send the fungus herewith sent to Mr Smith. Have you met in India or the Orient with a black fruited Melia Azedarach? I have the plant in Steetz's Herbarium without special indication of locality, and it would be a vast improvement to the ordinary variety which in the vernal season here looks absolutely wretched with its dirty yellow-brown drupes.

What is Salix Capensis?

I am just publishing 2 new Apheliae5

 

Aphelia

Cyperus

Melia Azedarach

Salix Capensis

1
MS annotation: 'Answd Nov 19/66.' Letter not found.
2
a South African species interlined above new deleted.
3
Neither MS or published diagnosis has been found.
4
Bentham had undertaken to reflect, in Flora austrliensis, M's opinions where they differed from his own; see Lucas (2001). M may have been upset by comments such as 'P[ultenaea] filifolia F Muell. Fragm. i, 9, from Kangaroo Island, Bannier, appears to me to be a luxuriant form of P. tenuifolia with remarkably long slender leaves, but F. Mueller's herbarium only contains a single specimen past flower, scarcely sufficient for identification' (Flora australiensis, vol. 2, p. 140), but there were also positive comments such as 'under the name of A[cacia] longifolia, I have followed F. Mueller in including the following forms, which, different as they generally appear, are connected by such a gradual chain of intermediates that they cannot be separated by any positive characters ...' (Flora australiensis, vol. 2, p. 398).
5

B89.13.12 lists only one Aphelia described by M at this time: A. brizula, B66.12.04, p. 203.

There is no valediction; the text ends at the bottom of the sheet; part of the letter may be missing.

Please cite as “FVM-66-09-09,” 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/66-09-09