To Eugene Hilgard   29 August 1886

29/8/86.

Let me thank you for your kind letter, dear Prof Hilgard,¹ and accept my assurance, that I highly appreciate your researches, and will give gladly any support from here, so far as I can. I hope you will find the Detroit edition of the "Select plants"² still more useful than the less extensive Sydney-one.³ I add supplemental notes, whenever such are attainable for subsequent editions, to which you perhaps can contribute now and then a few words; thus I just became aware of the value of the Californian Vicia gigantea, a few seeds of which I should like to have, if easily attainable, as culture may improve size and tast of the seeds. By some oversight in the hurry of issue, I omitted to mention in the preface, that our excellent friend, Dr Behr and yourself, had issued a series of rearranged articles from that work.⁴ If still a copy of the connected articles should be extant, I should be very grateful for it.

My means here in the Department are slender, and they are so severely taxed in many fold directions by the great variety of objects, expected to be advanced by me, that my whole private means have been gradually sunk in my researches, and I have not even enjoyed domestic life.

In your south the Jute ought to do admirably, and as labor will gradually become cheaper and machinery gets so much used, you ought to be able to make all comon bags in the state from your own material. Teosinte must be now common in the south. Phormium would on seashores, not otherwise readily utilized, yield everlastingly returns, if even only for the papermills in some places. Like with Ramie, the difficulty is with the choice of fit machinery. Phormium could be so easily brought across the Pacific[.] Willow-growth ought to become a grand industry in your state also any where, — and Chinese (though not likely Assam) Tea in your southern vallies. California, ere the century passes, might have its own cork.

Of course our superb Tan-Acacias you have by the thousands; but you need them by the millions! Can American ingenuity not devise a new cheap method, to isolate the fragrance of hundreds of various flowers, not yielding to ordinary distillation? The Australian Sheep-Saltbushes should be got for your inland saline plains towards Saltlake-City &c

From time to time I will send you utilitarian seeds, as occasion arises, to obtain them fresh.

With regardful remembrance your

Ferd. von Mueller.

Your Bulletins are splendid!

Acacia

Phormium

Vicia gigantea