To Joseph Hooker¹    10 August 1880

10/8/80

In answer to your question, dear Sir Joseph,² I would just mention, that I noted Batis as Halorageous in my "select plants"; the Indian (enlarged edition) you will doubtless have got from Calcutta direct.³ It may be best to keep it as a distinct order, but it seems to me to have its best place at all events near Halorageae, especially as the development of albumen of the latter is so very variable and holds not good for distinction in most other orders[.] You seem to have over looked Grisebach’s notes in the Flora of Brit. West India, where he puts it with Salsolaceae, after Kunth.⁴

My Material on Palms is very scanty, but I will send you what I have. In North Queensland the palms (even there like Bamboos) not numerous) occur in fever-jungles beset by cannibals; indeed I rather meet a tiger or Naja⁵ in India or a lion in Africa, than savage bipeds in the forest-recesses of N. E. Australia. Travelling moreover is expensive here; but if the Exhibition-duties⁶ are over I am likely to go to N. Queensland for a few months, to study palms & other plants needing local elucidation.⁷ The financial depression affects us all here also now more than ever, and with increasing debts of the colony & alienation of crown land and unproductive buildings & exhaustion of mines the prospects are not cheering! especially in a Department like mine, which is ruined almost totally already.

Regardfully your

Ferd. von Mueller.⁸

I send once more 89 & 91 of the fragm.,⁹ as they contain notes on palms: Ptychosperma Normanbyi is stoloniferous. Kentia minor I have referred to Bacularia¹⁰ (Drude intends in justice to acknowledge Bacularia as Beccari also will henceforth), a genus sufficiently established before Wendland’s. The spikes of B. minor are intrafoliaceous, therefore those of a true Bacularia & this species (unlike B. monostachya) is stoloniferous also.

Bacularia minor

Bacularia monostachya

Batis

Halorageae

Kentia minor

Ptychosperma Normanbyi

Salsolaceae