154 Collins Street
Hobart Town Feb 22d /69
Dear Baron Von Mueller1
I beg to claim your kind indulgence for troubling you thus soon again and which I am sure you will extend, as I do so in the cause of science.2
I have been remarkably successful in discovering fossil flora since my last ascent of Mt Wellington.3 Two days after I sent you the vegetable impressions I found a magnificent bed of fossiliferous shale teeming with cryptogamia and on the same day, in the very heart of the city a slab of clay rock covered with stems of plants — specimens of which I send herewith, in the hope that they may be thought […]4 your National […] you will be kind enough to submit them to professor McCoy.5
The clay rock formation is exposed in a vertical section by the road side and is built over. It overlies, and is conformable to the sandstone but is limited in extent. This deposit has had my attention for the last 12 years but never before detected a trace of organic structure. Waiting at this spot for the Bus, to take me to New Town6 the other day, I carelessly cast my eyes upon the formation when to my great delight I discovered the plants in about a square foot but apparently barren elsewhere. On my return while walking to town I accidentally turned up with the toe of my boot a peice of shale containing a splendid specimen of odontopteris. I found I was walking over a rich bed of fossils […] state of one of our […] to ask permission to work at it, when I feel certain I will be able to send you some specimens worth placing in your museum.
I send to your care a small collection of beetles for your friend Count de Castlenau. I do this as I do not know his address.
Apologising my dear Sir for being so troublesome
Believe me to remain
Your very humble Sert7
S. H. Wintle
P.S. Query — Don’t you think I am getting near my Calamites now? I enclose the specimens in two or three odd slips of my articles from one of our papers8
SHW
Calamites
Odontopteris
M was not created a Baron until 1871. There seems, however, to have been a misapprehension current in Hobart at the time Wintle wrote this letter that he had already been granted the title; see M to J. Agnew, April 1869 (in this edition as 69-04-00), and J. Agnew to M, 19 April 1969.
When M was visiting Tasmania in early 1869, Wintle met him and showed him a fossil plant, which M took back to Melbourne in order to obtain an opinion from the palaeontologist Frederick McCoy; subsequently, Wintle sent M further specimens (see M to S. Wintle, 2 February 1869 (in this edition as 69-02-02a)).
Tas.
Paper damaged — corner of sheet missing. All subsequent [...] arise from the same cause.
See M to F. McCoy, 28 February 1869 (in this edition as 69-02-28b).
Hobart.
Servant.
Enclosures not found. Wintle contributed natural history articles to the Launceston examiner, for example Wintle (1868) and Wintle (1868a), and the Hobart Mercury (Wintle (1869)), and also verse, but none of the 1868 or early 1869 articles found deals with the fossil plant, Calamites.
Please cite as “FVM-69-02-22b,” 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