To Joseph Hooker1    September 1869

 

[September 1869]2

 

I do not find it very difficult to raise ferns from spores. I raised many; but the spores require to be fresh and ripe. However I raised ferns from specimens, 20 years old in the herbarium.

There are very few Epacrideae near Melbourne, but I will look for seeds whenever I have a chance. In the garden I have no patch of heath, to grow such plants, and in my greenhouses is no room for them.

In my successive collections of seeds sent since 1853 there have been over and over different species of Epacrideae.

Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata is not from North Australia, as you mention in your last letter, but one of the two species occurring at St. Vincents Gulf (Vide Fragm. IV, III)3

The Bambuseae you promise will be a boon. Let them, please, by a special letter, entrusted4 to the care of the Captain.

Of course it was never my intention to burden any work on you as regards the edition of the cryptogamic portion of the Australian flora. All I solicited was your advise, and for that I am now and shall be grateful. I have my mosses now at Helsingfors & Lichenastra at Altona.5 I can finally put the different essays into an uniform English shape myself; Let others supplement the work. The foundation will then at least be laid. Mr Berkeley working on the fungi of Australia is very gratifying indeed.6 I hope the rev Gentleman will fully regain his strength.

It was very kind of you to advance to my former assistant7 what he needed, to get home to Saxony. I feel sure he will refund the loan, if he does not, I will see to it. He is no relative of mine. He must have been very careless in Liverpool.

Bear kindly in mind, that in all my askings, I have only the welfare of my department, never my private gain in view. My whole collections & the library to a large extent became public property as a donation of mine. So I have no private purpose to serve.

Always with best wishes your

Ferd. von Mueller.

 

Many thanks for you having sent off your parcels.8

 

Bambuseae

Epacrideae

Lichenastra

Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata

 
1
The correspondent and the approximate date are inferred from the content, which includes answers to points made in J. Hooker to M, 9 July 1869 and 11 July 1869, Hooker's 'last letter' received by M. The letters are unlikely to have reached Mueller in less than six weeks, and this folio is therefore dated to September 1869, the earliest month in which it could have been written. There is an annotation at the head of the folio ‘September/69’ which may be an indication of the date it was sent, if it was separated from a letter commencing on another folio. The letters M to J. Hooker, 6 September 1869 and M to J. Hooker, 11 September 1869 (in this edition as 69-09-11a), are complete with salutation and valediction; the letter J. Hooker to M, 24 November 1869, answers the letter of 6 September, and makes no comment on any of the topics in this folio. There are no later letters in 1869 to which this is an obvious conclusion or enclosure. No surviving letters from Hooker to M unambiguously contains a response to the content of this folio.
2
Editorial addition.
3
B64.05.01, pp. 110–3.
4
be entrusted?
5
Otto Lindberg at the University of Helsinki; Karl Gottsche at Altona.
6
See J. Hooker to M, 11 July 1869.
7
Theodor Mueller; see M to J. Hooker, 6 September 1870. Wilhelm Sonder also helped him when he reached Hamburg; see Sonder to F. Krauss, 31 July 1869 (in this edition as M69-07-31).
8
Marginal note on front of f. 397.

Please cite as “FVM-69-09-00,” 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 1 May 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/69-09-00