From Ferdinand von Mueller to the Editor, Australian Medical Journal   [Nov 1887]

Sir. — Could you kindly, for the sake of Australian priority, refer, in the next number of the Medical Journal, to my having excluded from phytology (in my "Key to the System of Victorian Plants")¹ all those organography expressions, which are used in the anatomy of the human body and thence in zoology. You might instance that the fibro-vascular tract in leaves is called by me uniformly "venules," instead of "ribs, nerves and veins," as hitherto designated according to calibre and course, such adjectives as carinular, costular, anastomosing, &c., rendering the simple use of the word venules clear in every respect and quite logical. In veins of the higher vertebrata and man, the venae cavae, azygos, portae &c., are quite responding to what is called midribs in plants, as regards size and firmness. Ovarium has become in my new work ovularium, albumen — albumentum (an ancient classic- word), placenta — placentarium, after De Candolle's early writings, though abandoned by himself. Hairs of animals are chemically and often also structurally different to those of plants, and are therefore called by me throughout "hairlets," so bristles — bristlets. The term "fruitlets," for the carpids (not well called carpels), was constructed by me before.² "Headlets" of flowers is in accordance with capitulum, not caput, and is consonant also to expressions used for flower-heads in the French, the German, the Italian, and the Spanish languages. Such terms as "beaks, horns, tails, mouth, lips, wings, palate, claw, &c." which came down to us from mediaeval and even ancient writers on plants, have been entirely banished from the phraseology of the "Key." What may be lost in brevity, is amply compensated for in lucidity, I trust. —

Yours, &c.

F. von Mueller.