To George Bowen   17 November 1878

Melbourne 17. Nov. 1878.

To his Excellency Sir G. Bowen,

G.C.M.G., Governor of Victoria.

Sir.

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of a copy of a despatch received by your Excellency from the Right hon. the Minister¹ of State for the colonies, accompanied by copies of letters from Sir Jos. Hooker and the honorable Sir² R. G. W. Herbert, respecting the completion of the first series of volumes of the Australian Flora,³ on which Mr G. Bentham has been engaged under my constant cooperation for the last 16 years.⁴ It is most gratifying to observe, that the Right Hon. Sir Mich. Hicks-Beach appreciates so highly the services thus rendered to the British and Colonial Empire of her Majesty, by which efforts the foundation work on the plants of one of the five great divisions of the globe is recently brought to a close. Every one must share the admiration, expressed by the distinguished Director of the Royal bot. Garden of Kew for Mr Benthams exertions, to elucidate the plants of the whole Australian continent, and this all the more as he at his venerable age has continued with youthful enthusiasm to work not merely with my aid on the plants of the greatest of the Queens Dominions, but has been engaged all the time also with Sir Joseph Hooker on an equally extensive work, namely the plant-genera of the whole globe.⁵ Both works involved the almost daily tracing of microscopic minutiae and an amount of detail-studies, which must have deprived him, whom we all recognize as the greatest phytographer of the day, of all repose even at the evening of a long and labourious life,⁶ and I trust, that this great man, while he is still spared us, will receive for his brilliant services the fullest imperial recognition. In justice to the colony, of which your Excellency is the vice-regal ruler, I may be permitted to observe more fully, what share Victoria has had in the issue of this certainly unique work, after Sir Jos. Hooker referred already in generous terms to my own efforts for rendering known the vegetable treasures of a continent nearly as large as Europe, inhabitable in all its zones, and rich in an endemic vegetation of much industrial value.⁷

In frankly setting forth my own engagements for the Flora of Australia, it is not done with any desire to earn any praise or reward whatever, but merely to show, that I endeavoured to acquit myself honorably of a task, which I commenced when I arrived 31 years ago (in 1847) in Australia, after the needful prior University education for the specialities of such work. Since then uninterruptedly engaged in Australia, I have extended the lines of my personal field-observations to between 27,000 and 28,000 miles, involving much of the toils, privations and dangers of early geographic exploration but affording me also unusual experience; the material thus accumulated by myself and supplemented by amateur-collectors or departmental emissaries exceeds one hundred thousand specimens from all parts of the Australian continent as far as hitherto mapped, embracing about 2/3 of all the localities recorded in the Flora Australiana. The whole of these enormous collections, nearly all examined by myself, were transmitted since 1862 gradually on loan to the illustrious main-author of the Flora, after my own successive observations on the species had to a great extent been recorded in the ten volumes of the "fragmenta phytographiae Australiae" and in some minor descriptive works, while the utilitarian value of many of the Australian plants was traced in my chemical laboratory, tested by my experimental cultures in the bot Garden of Melbourne, recorded in distinct publications and brought gradually at the successive great exhibitions before the commercial and technological world.

The first literary foundation of the Flora of Australia was laid (in 1810) by Robert Brown, the celebrated Naturalist of Flinders Expedition in his "prodromus,"⁸ comprising several thousand plants either of his own collections or those of others, chiefly of Sir Joseph Banks. Valuable scattered memoirs of many authors, now mostly numbering with the death,⁹ have followed, Mr Bentham's own early contributions dating as far back as 1837, all scattered except the researches of a number of men of science of several nations on the plants of West-Australia, collected by Prof. Lehmann¹⁰ into two volumes, and except also two splendid and illustrated volumes by Sir Jos. Hooker on the plants of Tasmania.¹¹

It was a rare facility, enjoyed by Mr Bentham, to be able to compare the original material chiefly among the great treasures at Kew, which the enlightened statesmanship of a great nation caused to be accumulated and there to be turned to unrivalled scientific account. In facilities like these I could only have participated by one or more visits to England, had it fallen to my sole share to elaborate connectedly the Flora of the fifth continent, a vast territory in the sole possession of Britain. It is now my intention, as announced by Mr Bentham in the preface to the 7th volume,¹² — if providence grants me life and health and if my researches should continue to obtain the needful fair and intelligent support —, to issue supplemental volumes for the description of those plants, discovered gradually since the Flora was issued;¹³ for the first volumes particularly extensive additions have been obtained through the geographic disclosures of vast regions of the interior during late years. It will furthermore be needful to edit separate volumes on mosses, lichens, fungi and algae,¹⁴ though of these the latter are to a great extent already elaborated by the late Professor Harvey in his five illustrated volumes, the result of his two years travels along the Australian coast.¹⁵

If I have at some perhaps undue length entered into this exposition, the Right honorable the Secretary of State will kindly consider, that I have made the study of plants of all Australia an object of life, that I have sacrificed for it nearly all that is dear to us in the world, and that it is with some pardonable pride when I own to have lived through the greater portion of the century of main-discovery of natural history and to have helped to unfold largely the vegetable objects, which nature with prodigal richness has strewed over the grandest possession of the British crown.¹⁶

I have the honor to be,

your Excellencys very obedient

Ferd. von Mueller