To Edward Ramsay   4 March 1886

4/3/86.

 

Accept my best thanks, dear Dr Ramsay, for your information, concerning the Marsupials, feeding on the grain of Triodia.1

The fung, found by Mr Bennett, I had only once before, also from the desert-interior. It is my Scleroderma pandanaceum, described in the proceed L. S2 of London many years ago3

It is very good of you, that you will provide Capt Strachan4 with some paper and pasteboards. He ought to have at least one ream of printing paper and half a ream of brown paper. If specimens in the paper after a short pressure are laid out into numerous thin sets with a cross-tie to each, and are the sets are5 placed on a sunny spot or near a fire, they soon will dry; and shifting into fresh paper is not required, if each of the thin sets is now and then halved (as in card shifting), the outer dry part coming thus inside, while the wet inner part comes outside. Fruiting specimens as valuable as flowering ones. Surely we ought to get thus flowering & fruiting branchlets of the Cedar &c for naming

I shall be delighted to see you, when you come to Melbourne.

Regardfully

your

Ferd. von Mueller.

 

Capt Strachan will see from these printed slips,6 that he will get full credit for what he discovers

 

Scleroderma pandanaceum

1
See M to E. Ramsay, 6 January 1886 (in this edition as 86-01-06a).
2
Linnean Society.
3
M was credited as author by Berkeley in Journal of the Linnean Society, Botany (1873), vol. 13, p. 171 (read 18 January 1872).
4
Strachan had returned to Sydney at the end of March 1886 after examining 'a very large portion of the rivers and country to the north-west, and other portions of the Papuan Gulf' (Sydney morning herald, 1 April 1886, p. 6), and had announced his intention to leave Sydney again in April and 'to remain in New Guinea for about two years, during which time he will continue his explorations and the opening up of trade centres on the coast and in the interior' (Capricornian (Rockhampton, Qld), 20 February 1886, pp 24, 25).
5
M finished a page with are and interlined the sets are at the start of the first line on the next page.
6
Slips not found.

Please cite as “FVM-86-03-04a,” 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 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/86-03-04a