13/5/77
In reply to your letter, dear Capt Hutton, I beg to say, that a little compilation of notes on Australian or rather Victorian Timbers has been made for the technologic Museum from various Exhibition Reports and other Documents. This publication is to appear this month & may partly supply the information, sought by you.1
I send you also here with a volume on industry-plants, in which a good deal on timber from all parts of the globe is said.2
Why does the Government of your colony not reprint it, as I had given gratuitously the concession to do so.3 What an enormous good would be done to the cultures of your islands, by the distribution of 2000 or 3000 copies of the work, which could be done for £200. Can you send me in spring some flowers of Stylidium subulatum in Alcohol. The Head of your Grammar School4 knows the locality of the plant near you (in tufts of Oreobolus). I have transferred the plant to Phyllachne! (Forstera), but like to see better material, also to know, whether the column of genitalia is irritable & thus spontaneously movable.
I have not yet seen the new volume of the Institute.5
Regardfully your
Ferd. von Mueller.
Can I obtain zoologic specimens from you in exchange for books? My laboratory is pulled down, so I cannot continue the investigations on woods, and I have no fund to bring out the lithograms of Eucalypts for an intended Atlas.6
Forstera
Oreobolus
Phyllachne
Stylidium subulatum
Industrial and Technological Museum (Melbourne) (1877). A prefatory note by J. Cosmo Newbery indicated that the catalogue had been 'carefully compiled by Mr. Thos. M'Millan, and kindly revised by Baron von Mueller'.
B76.12.04.
See M to J. Haast, 21 May 1874; M to J. Hector, 10 August 1874; G. Cooper to M, 6 October 1874 (in this edition as 74-10-06b); M to G. Cooper, 3 November 1874.
M probably had in mind George Malcolm Thomson (1848-1933) who had written on the botany of Otago and who was Science Master — not Headmaster — at Otago Boys' High School, Dunedin, at this period. However, it seems that Donald Petrie supplied the specimens that M used to confirm his opinion; see D. Petrie to M, 16 January 1878, and B78.06.01.
New Zealand Institute.
B79.13.11 is the first part of this publication.
Please cite as “FVM-77-05-13,” 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