To Daniel Oliver   16 August 1886

16/8/86

This day's mail, dear Prof. Oliver, brought me your kind letter of the 3th July,¹ enclosing a single flower and leaf of a Swainsona. It would be hazardous to offer an opinion thereon, worth having, as this genus is one of the most difficult for discriminating its specific forms, more particularly so, as the material, from which the great Bentham elaborated the species was 22 years ago still so very imperfect. Since then my collections of Australian Leguminoseae became about threefold enlarged, and many of the species can from the larger series of specimens now much better be defined than then. This I find particularly also in illustrating now lithographically select Acaciae.

I added seven good species to Swainsona, since the Flora Austr. vol. II. was published, and some more may yet lurk concealed; but without seeing ripe fruit it is impossible to do justice to any of these plants, just as in the huge genus Astragalus, so nearly allied. Perhaps the plant in the Hull bot. Garden² will ripen fruit, when the species could be more readily determined. It was my intention, to revise the whole genus since some time; I commenced to do so twice or thrice; but always so much report-writing, correspondence, calls at my office for information &c. intervened, that I never could complete the task, it requiring even with the large mass of material now here the spare-hours of several weeks.

Regardfully your

Ferd. von Mueller.

The fresh color of the petals is a good characteristic; but in drying often lost.³

Dr Wawra figured a Swainsona as new in the vol. of the "Reise der Prinzen v. Coburg-Gotha".⁴

Acacia

Astragalus

Leguminoseae

Swainsona