To George Bentham   18 April 1874

Melbourne

18/4/74.

 

I thank you, dear Mr Bentham, for your kind letter of the 10 febr, and will in accordance with your request effect the shipping of the first box for vol. VII in a few weeks. It was useless to send it off, before I knew, that you would be ready. I imagine that it will take you yet several month to finish the second half of the second volume of the genera,1 though D. C. prodromus has done so much for the Monopetaleae & Monochlamydeae.2

It is very good of you to express a wish that I should devote myself now settled to scientific works;3 but my venerable friend you quite overlook, that I have only £300 for the whole department, which whole sum would not even suffice in this expensive country to rent the necessary house accommodation for my official work, not even an office room being left me and not even my laboratory, not even a messenger nor means for the most ordinary clerical aid not to speak of field services, chemicals [test], apparatus, experiments, prints, lithographics &c4 Though I am quite willing to throw my modest salary into the department, as I have always done, and am willing to sacrifice domestic happiness and even the means of providing for old age also now again, yet it stands to reason, that out of a Salary I cannot carry on a Gov. Botanists Department. You will remember that all my fellow colonists come for official information to me on the most varied questions, involving an enormous sacrifice of time and necessitating a most extensive correspondence besides continual reading up. How can I do all this without votes and buildings. The position, as a Departmental one, is almost ruined, and it is singular, that of all the men of science in England, unless Dr Masters, not one has taken publicly or in letters which I could have utilized here, the slightest notice of the fact, that my votes & buildings are swept away.5 I wrote many months ago to Kew for an abstract of the expenses of that great establishment minus the horticultural outlay.6 I trusted I should have had this return by this mail, not that I expect to obtain one fourth of the fund here, but to give my few friends in the legislature here an idea of the expenses incurred by the House of Commons for similar purposes. Had these few notes from the Kew estimate reached me, they would have helped me to get some votes again, now as the new estimates for the finance-year, commencing July are framed.

I think also, that Mr Charles Darwin might have had spontaneously a friendly word for me, as he is so intimate with Dr Hooker and the nearest neighbour of the principal proprietor of the paper,7 which mainly has effected my present and perhaps permanent ruin.8

Ever, my dear Mr Bentham, yours

Ferd von Mueller

 

Monochlamydeae

Monopetaleae

 
1
Bentham & Hooker (1862-83), vol. 2, part 2 was published in 1876.
2
A. P. de Candolle (1824-73). See vol. 17, pp. 307-10 for a list of Orders by major group, and the volumes within which they were treated.
3
G. Bentham to M, 10 February 1874.
4
not to speak … lithographs &c is a marginal note with its intended position indicated with an asterisk.
5
The Gardeners' chronicle, 11 May 1872 p. 633, defended M by using the receipt of volume 7 of M's Fragmenta as an occasion to argue strongly in an editorial against the 'antagonistic feeling' and the 'spiteful character of much of the opposition that has been raised against' him. (Masters also ran a long article, a memoir with portrait in Gardeners' chronicle , 31 May 1873, pp. 743-4, which does not mention M's troubles although it sets out the value he provided to colonists. The notice of his loss of the post of Government Botanist, described as 'retirement', did not 'profess to judge the circumstances which may have led to this step, … [but it appears that] … the authorities maniifest an ignorance of the proper function of a botanic garden' ( Gardeners' chronicle , 16 August 1873, pp. 1109-10).
6
M to J. Hooker, 6 November 1873.
7
i.e. Edward Wilson, joint proprietor of the Argus.
8
For a Kew view of M's position see J. Hooker to H. Barkly, 5 August 1874 (in this edition as M74-08-05).

Please cite as “FVM-74-04-18a,” 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/74-04-18a