To William Carruthers   27 August 1883

27/8/83.

 

I have not written to you for a long time, dear Mr Carruthers, and ought to have done something for your grand institution ere this; but I am still in arrear with much of my Department’s work since the Melbourne Exhibition,1 which taxed my time as one of the Commissioners and in three professional juries very much. This year I had again to give some aid for Victoria being represented in the Exhibitions of Amsterdam and of Calcutta.2 So I have not even been able to do justice to my official work in all instances. For Calcutta and Amsterdam I had prepared “wood-books”, a pattern of which I beg to send you by this post.3 It is a cheaper and more desirable form of showing wood samples than that adopted by me for the second London Exhibition 20 years ago,4 when for the first time woodbooks were designed by me.

Probably you see Sir Henry Barkly often, as that enlightened Gentleman lives near you in Bina-Gardens.5

I hope you will support the Rev. Jul. Tenisons Woods election into the R.S., this or rather next year.6

The second decade of veg. fossils,7 finished more than a year ago, has not yet appeared owing mainly to the fire, which consumed part of the Governm Printing Establishment last year.8

Regardfully your

Ferd. von Mueller.

 

You can have a set of Mr Woods plants when they come from India.9

Kind regards to Prof Owen. I alluded to him specially in the last meeting of the Victorian Branch of the British Medical Association.10

International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1880-1.
Internationale Koloniale en Uitvoerhandel Tentoonstelling [International Colonial Exhibition], Amsterdam, 1883; International Exhibition, Calcutta, 1883-4.
See B83.10.02.
International Exhibition, London, 1862.
The 1881 Census gives Barkly’s address as 1 Bina Gardens, Kensington; William Carruthers was living at 4 Woodside Villas, Victoria Road, Lambeth, but worked in the British Museum (Natural History), about 800 metres from Barkly’s residence.
Julian Tenison Woods was an unsuccessful candidate in the Royal Society's elections in 1883 and 1884, and then again each year from 1886 to 1888.
B83.13.04.
On 24 May 1882, when the building was unoccupied during the public holiday to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday.
The sentence is in the left margin of the front of the folio. J. Tenison Woods travelled from mid-1883 until mid-1886 through Java, the Straits Settlements (where he was engaged by Governor Weld to report on the tin deposits: see Woods [1884a]), Borneo, Hong Kong, Manila, Japan, the Celebes. See Press (1994), chapter 14, and his own published accounts, for example Woods (1884b, 1885).
Sentence written in central and right margins of the back of the folio.

Please cite as “FVM-83-08-27,” 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 28 March 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/83-08-27