To George Bentham   29 September 1878

Hay (Murrumbidgee)¹

Sunday, 29. Sept. 1878.

Two or three monthly mails have passed, dear Mr Bentham, without my acknowledgement of your last letter, in which you announced, that the Flora had finally come to a close.² Let me congratulate you; it involved exertions to you for the last 15 years which at your venerable age few would have been able to sustain. You must be grateful to providence for allowing you mental strength and the retention of unimpaired eyesight for having been able to study the minutiae of structure of even such plants as the glumaceae extensively, while young workers even often shrink from work of this kind, if to be carried on for lengthened periods.

This letter is written on the Murrumbidgee, after an excursion of mine to the Lachlan River,³ where I wished to trace the range northward of many of the southern annuals, and where I also needed to examine the extensive saltbush plains with a view of learning, what are the most nutritive species. The journey proved for the geography of Australian plants most interesting, but (as anticipated) it yielded me hardly any novelties. I went away also for a short while from Melbourne for exercise in the open air and to rouse my dreadfully depressed spirit. After more than 5 years “struggle for existence”⁴ I got not even so far as to obtain an office building again, and the few hundred £ left for the working of my Department are not even sufficient to carry on in this expensive country a mere fraction of my former work for science & departmental daily requirements of the colonists, and thus the work is thrown mainly on my salary. It is a most bitter feeling, and were I not a christian, it would have long ago driven me to desperation. The votes, squandered in my garden since the last 5 years, are absolutely enormous, but for myself no proper means can be found, perhaps because I am a foreigner here. However Mr Graham Berry, the present Premier, who has treated me at least with consideration and civility has promised to do something towards the resuscitation of my Department, but what it will be & when it will take place is not yet decided; certainly not much.

As regards the supplements for the “Flora” I have not yet adopted final arrangements. The first step is to obtain for a printer the subsidy of £250 pr. volume, granted to yourself. For this I have made application.⁵ Then I doubt, whether any Australian publisher will print a single page on his own risk, & as printing is here nearly double as expensive as in England, I shall have to pay at least half my annual salary to bring out a volume of supplements. I will write you, when I have completed my arrangements. The additions, which I have to make to the localities even of the last volume are enormous.

My Eucalyptus Atlas⁶ makes very slow progress, simply because I have no departmental means, such as were (even then with much smaller votes) available to me at the bot Garden[.]⁷ I wrote a forest report for the W. Australian Government (of course gratis), in which I elucidated all their best timber Eucalypts also, but it seems not yet printed.⁸

The issue of Wittsteins Chemistry (organic) of plants in an English Edition⁹ enlarged by myself has involved me also in an outlay of £250, and it seems that I shall not even clear £50 by the sale of copies Thus I must postpone the printing of an enlarged edition of the select plants, which otherwise is ready for the press.¹⁰ My God! what could I have done also for that work, to benefit the colonists, had the bot Garden, with its living plants for daily observations & my laboratory remained under me me, not to speak of work of mine stopped in many other directions But I suppose, I must be crushed .

Trusting that Providence will grant you yet long life for the completion of your works

I remain with friendliest remembrance

Ferd von Mueller

Glumaceae