To William Henry Archer   October 1873

Mortons Hotel,

Milswyn-Street,

S. Yarra¹

/Sunday.

I intended since some days, dear Mr Archer, to write to you and to thank you for the graceful manner, in which you alluded to myself in your luminous presidential Adress at the microscopic Society,² and I deferred it merely, as I wished to see, whether my future would be such as to enable me to go on with scientific work, and thus to support also the new society under your auspices.

If you turn to the estimates of this financial year,³ you will find that beyond my own salary only £300 are provided for my whole Department! As this covers only the Salary of one Museum Assistant & the payment of some stationary & incidentals, I have to bear out of my own Salary the payments of a Messenger, of a clerical Assistant, of all new books & journals (this item alone at least £100 a year) office rent, (no Office room even left me) and so many other Departmental expenses, that I cannot exist, though I took merely refuge in a modest Hotel, after I was driven out of my Department after 22 years toil to create it! The reductions in the Department during the last few years were such, that I had to dispose of all my private property to continue my scientific relation with others and to carry on my independent researches.

With my progressing age my strength also gets enfeebled, especially after the privations [&] hardships of many years explorations, and as I have no property whatever, I must decrease the expenses of my scientific work also now, after the ruin of my position in June last.

I wrote therefore to Dr Robertson, that I should even be obliged to withdraw from the Linnean and the Royal Geographic Society, altho I should remain in the Royal Society of London, where I have no annual contribution to pay. Unless indeed I get aid in my department by additional or supplementary votes, I cannot afford to be under annual contribution either at the microscopic or any other Society. As you are a compeer of mine in the service since more than 20 years, I frankly mention this to you. Dr Hooker can of course not believe that his former colleague here has become so utterly ruined. My Office is in this Hotel since 4 months! The calls on me for information are just as great as before, though I have no Department left to carry on my work. Hardly any one has come near me here for 4 months, and even most of my friends think I have to complain of nothing and set themselves up as judges of my professional Department!

Should however my Departmental position be so reestablished, that I can with new hopes look to the future, I should much like to join the new microscopic Society, but as my small income of former years allowed me never to save anything, though I never speculated and though I sacrificed the wishes for domestic & family life to my scientific pursuits, I would wish much to become by the payment of one sum a life-member of the Society. I fancy you are framing rules now, and might provide for life-memberships.

I think that I can be of great use to the Society, when I come to elaborate the cryptogamic volumes of the Australian Flora.⁴ Perhaps I can also aid members in the elaboration of diagnoses of many new minute forms of vegetable life. You yourself deserve unbounded praise for working as you do on microscopic objects, with all the burdens of a heavy and responsible Department on you.

Ever with regardful remembrance

your Ferd von Mueller