12/10/88
Am much beholden to you, dear Mr Dean, for your kindly securing the specimen with semi-matured fruit of Acacia pruinosa.1 You can add to the obligation, if — perhaps through a local friend — you could let me have a branchlet with ripe fruit, when to be got somewhat later in the season.
Until the Exhib,2 with all its duties, has come to its "finale" in all glory and long-lasting usefulness, it will be impossible for me to do justice to all correspondence. So be charitable with me for any shortcomings of mine. Our friend, Mr Maiden, is still eager for getting Mt Seaview explored during midsummer,3 though he should not enter on any great physical exertions, to climb hights &c as he is suffering from pulmonary weakness; perhaps you will be one of the party? Perhaps also Mr Wilkinson would join it in the interest of geology, if you asked him in my name, and the Surveyor General would doubtless spare a surveyor for 2 or 3 weeks, to take a set of angles and obtain accurate hypsometric data. If the forest ranger of the District was joining the party, he would be a great acquisition and so the local Land-Officer.
Regardfully your
Ferd von Mueller
The hight of Mt Seaview unaltered on the maps at 6000' for more than 30 years is likely overrated.4
Acacia pruinosa
Specimens with ripe fruit had been requested in M to H. Deane, 23 February 1888, and M to H. Deane, 18 March 1888.
Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888-9.
M had been urging an expedition to Mt Seaview, in northern NSW, for some time. The earliest letters found are M to Linnean Society of New South Wales, March 1887 (in this edition as 87-03-00c), and M to E. Ramsay, 18 March 1887. Maiden (1898) in his description of the first botanical expeditIon to the area in November 1897 wrote that 'In the year 1884, the late Baron von Mueller first wrote to me suggesting that I should go to Mount Seaview, as the mountain promised a harvest of rare plants'. That letter not found.
On modern maps, the height of Mt Seaview is given as 3644 feet (1112 metres).
Please cite as “FVM-88-10-12,” 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