To Joseph Hooker   10 July 1870

Bot. garden 10/7/70.

 

By this mail, dear Dr Hooker, you will receive a set of those lithograms, which I had prepared since the 2-volume was issued,1 but which Mr Bentham has not seen, though I am certain that I sent them successively to Kew.

I have only lately had an opportunity (for want of leisure before) to read Mr Fitch's admirable instructions on drawings of plants, as published in the Gardeners Chronicle.2 I intend to make these excellent remarks the basis of a discourse, which I have undertaken to deliver at our new school of design.3 Would it not be well, if the whole was reprinted, as it is very incommodious to find the articles together, scattered as they are through the chronicle.4 The same remark applies to Mr Berkeleys essays on plant diseases,5 which observations I hoped the Rev Gentleman would have collected again in the form of a book. We want badly some pathology of plants, & the mycologic portion could be done by no one better justice to than Mr Berkeley. I have again sent some fungi for his examination, altho' I confess in candor, that I feel discouraged in these sendings, the long promised examination of the Australian species never having taken place, unless now at last under progress. I should have thought, that an observer, so experienced as Berkeley, would at least be able to work the majority of easily recognised species up without any great sacrifice of time.6

I have not as yet been able to get more Todeas out of the Ranges, the season having been too wet.

Always with kind regards

Ferd. von Mueller.7

1
Presumably lithograms printed but not otherwise published after the 2 volumes of Plants indigenous to the colony of Victoria (B62.02.01, B65.13.04). See Ewart ([1910]), which includes plates drawn for, but not published by, M.
2
Fitch (1869).
3
M delivered his lecture, ‘On the principles which rule the art of drawing plants from nature’, to the Artisans School of Design on 5 August 1870 (Argus, 6 August, p. 5). The Lecture appears never to have been published.
4
No such publication was issued.
5
Berkeley published 173 numbered short notes, signed ‘M. J. B.’ under the general title of ‘Vegetable Pathology’ in the Gardeners’ Chronicle between 1854 and 1857. A full list was included in the concluding note (Berkeley (1857)).
6

Berkeley (1873) describes or lists fungi noted on M to M. Berkeley, 25 July 1860 and many other species.

It was not only M who complained about Berkeley’s tardiness: Charles Darwin commented to J. Hooker, 11 January 1844, that 'My cryptogamic collection [from the Beagle voyage] was sent to Berkeley; it was not large; I do not believe he has yet published an account, but he wrote to me some year ago that he had described & mislaid all his descriptions'. See Burkhardt & Smith (1987), p. 2.

7

A letter from J. Hooker to Berkeley dated ‘Kew, Wednesday’ is filed on the same page of the guard book as an undated note by M: ‘I always send all my specimens of the fungi to Mr. Berkeley. The rev. Gentleman could therefore oblige by sending of each kind a specimen back whenever the material admits of it.’ The latter is annotated by Hooker: ‘From Ferdinand Mueller the unconscionable to J D Hooker the sufferer’ (Natural History Museum, Botany Library, Berkeley correspondence vol. 7 Hoo – Jer).

The associated letter offers Berkeley 'a few notes on the Southern Fungi just as I made them' and goes on to say that Hooker will send extracts of Berkeley's instructions for collecting fungi to 'any of my correspondents in New Zealand & to Gunn in VDL hoping to get up a Mycologia of these countries'.

Please cite as “FVM-70-07-10b,” 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 26 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/70-07-10b