To Edward Ramsay   21 March 1875

Berrigurra,¹ near Colac,

21/3/75.

I am on a professional journey, dear Mr Ramsay, and received here your letter of the 12th. I thank you for your goodness in exerting yourself amidst so much work about the Coal-fossils. I will write direct to Mr Mackenzie in accordance with your suggestion. By this post I will repeat my request regarding your election into the L.S.,² should there have been any remissness before, but I think it likely, that the election came off long before this. I trust your brothers will still continue their searches for palms in Queensland and for other new plants. Could Mr Hills Iris have been a Dianella? Were the flowers so small as that of a Dianella? or could there have been a scitamineous plant, which he took for the great Iris or Moraea? I wonder also, whether after all Mr Eaves's Elm is a fiction. It is however not showy, and as he evidently did not know what it was, he could not have willingly sent it as a cultivated plant. A good many plants are universal to the Himalaias, China, Japan & East Australia (and here the East only) that I can well imagine the Elm is one (as it extends to the Himalaias and is not confined to Japan or China) as long supposed.

If you care to enter the Royal Geographic Society also, which you have every right to desire after so much travels of your own, then I will be your sponsor there gladly also. The Dianella from the Richmond River with the narrow leaves & crowded flower is D. congesta RBr.

Very regardfully your

Ferd. von Mueller.

Dianella congesta

Iris

Moraea