To Odoardo Beccari   23 September 1880

23/9/80

You have in Webb’s collection the plants of Labillardière, dear Prof Beccari, and thus you would be able to identify Eucalyptus incrassata; as I am not sure, whether Bentham recognized it rightly in the large form of E. dumosa.1 Perhaps you have even a leaf, bud, flower and fruit from Lab. specime[n]2 to spare so that I could institute the comparison myself. I hope you get the Eucalyptograph, regularly and free in post.3

Only after the Exhibition4 I shall have time to make a return-sending for the Sumatra-plants.5

Regardfully your

Ferd. von Mueller

 

I suppose all your sets of duplicates are distributed, otherwise one would be highly acceptable & I could return Queensland plants for it.

Have you never met in Florence the generous Madame Smillie, who lately lost her last child, a most accomplished daughter there.6

7Lygodium Japonicum is well known to me; I identified it for Australia with L. scandens & L. reticulatum already in 1870 (fragm. VII, 83-84.);8 if a wrong name came with D’Albertis’s9 plants to Baker, then two spec. must have been intermingled, or the labels have become displaced.

Linné did not name any Lygodium, nor Zollinger any Psilotum

 

Eucalyptus dumosa

Eucalyptus incrassata

Lygodium japonicum

Lygodium reticulatum

Lygodium scandens

Psilotum

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1
See Bentham (1863-78), vol. 3,, pp. 230–1; B60.05.01, p. 59.
2
editorial insertion: paper is damaged.
3
Decades 5 and 6 of B80.13.14 had been received elsewhere in Europe by September 1880.
4
International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1880-1.
5
See M to O. Beccari, 5 February 1880.
6
Jean Nairne Smillie, daughter of the former Advocate General of SA, William Smillie, died in Florence on 29 February 1880 (South Australian register, 30 April 1880, p. 2 S).
7
The remaining text is from a single sheet, pinned inside this letter.
8
B70.01.01.
9
Luigi Maria d'Albertis.

Please cite as “FVM-80-09-23a,” 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 26 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/80-09-23a