Chief Secretary's Office,
Melbourne, 18th August 1876
Sir,
I have the honor to inform you that a Bill of Lading for the Goods described in the margin,1 shipped for your department per the "Somersetshire" has been received at this office, and has been forwarded to the Treasury for the usual course.2
I have the honor to be,
Sir,
Your most obedient Servant,
W. H. Odgers3
The Government Botanist
Marginal annotation: '3 Cases (seeds)'.
The file contains a small note in an unknown hand: 'No Invoices received 28/6/76'. It also contains a letter from Shaw, Williams & Co., 9 Fenchurch Street, London, ship and insurance brokers, to the Chief Secretary, dated 28 June 1876, forwarding the Bill of Lading for 'three cases Seeds shipped pr (ss) Somersetshire (ss) for Melbourne' and the Bill of Lading itself, dated 22 June 1876 which was registered at the Chief Secretary's Office on 26 August and forwarded to the Treasurer on 28 August. There is a pencilled note attached to the file: 'If there are more of the sand binding seeds we should get them out there is no means of ascertaining it', overwritten by 'See letter from Mueller yesterday'.
The seeds were a result of discussions between M and the Government about methods of checking sand drifts on the western Victorian coast between Belfast (now Port Fairy) and Warrnambool, see M to R. Ramsay, 28 June 1875, and M to W. Odgers, 29 September 1875. See also Heathcote & Maroske (1996).
The file includes a second, unsigned copy of this letter, registered as item 9201 and dated 'August 1876'. See also R. Gudemann to M, 24 August 1876, and M to W. Odgers, 26 August 1876.
MS annotation on p. 228: 'Letters as on page 17 to the following'; p. 17 is a printed letter with spaces left for the insertion of specific details.
Please cite as “FVM-76-08-18,” 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