To Joseph Hooker¹    11 August 1869

11/8/69

Your trip to St. Petersburg, dear Dr Hooker, must have been one of great pleasure. I am glad also to hear, that you met the excellent Sonder on your home way.² This week by the Norfolk will be despatched to you box 53. It contains supplemental Monochlamydeae, and besides a case with a cast of the great mass of gold, found in this colony a few months ago, the largest authentic mass of gold on record. It was valued about £10,000 and found as a solid block within a few inches of the surface!³ Pray send on the cast to Prof Owen for the British Museum. The Professor will doubtless arrange about having it gilded. The form is destroyed by the proprietor purposely.

I had some Todeas & Dicksonias at St Petersburg, but do not know, whether they recovered in time for the exhibition. Possibly you are not aware, that I was the first, as far as I know, who moved large Todeas, and when I had demonstrated this here. Verschaeffelt⁴ got his Todeas from Mt Macedon. It is strange, that in the course of nearly 400 years no one should have brought Todeas of large size to Europe from South Africa.

I have to ask a special favor. Could you not get through Dr Asa Grays kind mediation some seeds and roots of Veratrum viride[?]⁵ The American physicians have drawn our attention to the use of this remarkably efficacious plants in all cases where the circulation is to be retarded and we have witnessed here from the effect of this Veratrum astonishing cases of reductions of large aneurism

I should like to cultivate not only Veratrum viride but also V. album in the medicinal division of the Garden, neither of the species being as yet in Australia.

Mr Moore's plants from Lord Howe's Island are very interesting, and we have engaged on united expense one of the islanders to collect for us through the season.⁶

I shall describe the new Spiridens in the next number of the Fragmenta.⁷

In the herbarium I use Lenormands method with great success to destroy insect life by vapours of Bisulphid of Carbon.

Among the rare plants, obtained from New Caledonia, is Leptaspis Banksii.

Let me hope, that the Rev Mr Berkeley will collect his essays on diseases of plants from the pages of the Gardeners Chronicle into a special little volume and bring it up to a general pathology of plants with all the new discoveries of later days. The book would sell well!

Can you not get me good seeds of Sechium edule from Madeira? where it is much cultivated? The plant is not in Australia.

I have got a series of the plants collected by Schultz at Port Darwin. There is scarcely any novelty among it, still many plants are rare, such as Fimbristylis xyridis [RBr][.]⁸ I will furnish to Mr Goyder a report on the collection.⁹

Is Thrixspermum Loureiro (of barbarous etymology) = Sarchochilus? I have not Reichenbachs Xenia¹⁰ to see this.

A bound copy of vol. VI of Fragmenta goes to you & Mr Bentham by this mail.

With best regards

Ferd von Mueller.

Dicksonia

Fimbristylis xyridis

Leptaspis Banksii

Sarchochilus

Sechium edule

Spiridens

Thrixspermum

Todea

Veratrum album

Veratrum viride