From George Bentham   15 November 1876

25, WILTON PLACE. S.W.

London

Novr 15 1876¹

My dear Sir

I write a few lines to say that the Agamemnon has been in about a fortnight.² There has I believe been some delay in unloading her and your two boxes are not yet at Kew but will be I hope tomorrow or next day[.]³ I have also this morning received the bill of lading of a box from Wendland of Herrenhausen which I presume contains at length your Palms⁴ so that I hope to get on steadily with the work and ere long return you a box. In the mean time I have been working up such Australian Cyperaceae as are common to India and other parts of the world and have made up my mind as to several difficult points of synonymy so that I still expect to get through the Order by January when I trust your Gramineae will arrive.

I had once intended putting into this last volume some general remarks on the Geographical distribution of the Australian Flora both in Australia and in other countries with which it is connected but I have been obliged to give up the idea. Hooker gave so good a summary in his Introduction to the Tasmanian Flora⁵ that nothing would now be acceptable without working up in the same spirit all that has since been learnt on the subject by recent discoveries and this would take me up more time than I can now spare besides that I have not the local knowledge necessary for rightly judging of the details and all general principles must remain as laid down by Hooker. It would however I think be of much interest if you with your experience would give us a general view of the character and extent of the different floras more or less spread over Australia The widely spread desert flora of the interior the Indo-Australian to the north east the subantarctic in Tasmania and Victoria and the two distinct East and South-west endemic floras. This you could well do and take the opportunity of compleating the list of Australian plants with references to where you have published the species not contained in my flora and rearranging the whole systematically according to your views of genera and species when they differ from mine.

If I am up to more work when I have got this volume off my hands I hope to devote myself to Genera Plantarum.⁶

Yours very sincerely

George Bentham

Baron Ferdd v. Mueller

Cyperaceae

Gramineae