12/2/77.
The two case with filices, dear Mr Bentham, will go by the "Newcastle" to Kew. I have not inserted the last supplements, as in the still ruined state of my Department I can only work a few hours on Sunday mornings in my Museum with comfort, and had really no leisure for the final sorting. Mr Baker can do it easily at Kew.
You refer me to the Linnaea for the description of Palms by Wendland & Drude,1 but since the bot. Garden with its votes was withdrawn from me, I bec[o]me far too poor to purchase such journals, though I still manage to get Trimens & the bot. Magazine. Masters sends me the Chronicle without expense.2 The men of science in Britain ought to have given me some kind support to maintain or restore my Department, especially as Edw. Wilson was so near to Darwin, not to speak of other influential Australians in London.
It would be anomalous to suppose, that A. Farnesiana was indigenously restricted in the E. hemisphere to Australia.3 The best authority on classic plants is Fraas, because unlike Sprengel & others he lived studied & travelled in Greece and other countries at the Medit[erranean] Sea.
Fraas gives both A. vera & A. farnesiana as Mediterranean;4 the latter is the Ἡ λευκή ακανδοσ of Theophrastos, h. pl. 4, 3; and to it also belongs a passage of Dioscorides I, 113.5 Sprengel referred these quotations wrongly to Spartium scorpius.6 Like the Guilandinae7 I fancy this Acacia belongs to both hemispheres since historic times; where they came from before who will tell? Cocos has also an eastern & western representative though the nuts may have drifted from one continent to an other
Regardfully
Ferd von Mueller
Acacia farnesiana
Acacia Guilandinae
Acacia vera
Cocos
Filices
Spartium scorpius
H. Wendland & Drude (1875).
Journal of botany; Curtis’s botanical magazine; Gardeners' chronicle.
See M to G. Bentham, 23 September 1876 (in this edition as 79-06-23c).
C. Fraas (1845), pp. 65-6.
It is not known whether M had access to editions of Theophrastus or, if he used secondary sources, which one: there is no edition of Historia plantarum in the library at the Melbourne Herbarium, and although there are several editions of, or commentaries on, Theophrastus's works catalogued in Public Library of Victoria (1880), an edition of Historia plantarum is not among them. For a parallel Greek-English version of Historia plantarum, see Theophrastus (1916-26). Although there is no edition of Dioscorides at the herbarium Library, M would have access to Dioscorides (1598) at the Public Library.
J. H. Ross (1980) discusses the problems of interpreting these classical sources. See also M to B. Balfour, 2 May 1889.
Sprengel (1807-8), vol. 1, p. 97.
Acacia guilandinae.
Please cite as “FVM-77-02-12,” 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