From Joseph Hooker   1890

[The Camp.

Sunningdale.]1

 

[…]2 get it printed so as to sell at a reasonably cheap rate is the rub. With a publisher the prices will be prohibitive. There will be at least 3 vols quarto with 1600 pages each & 3 columns on a page, for there are upwards of 60,000 entries! & this only to the year 1885.3 — I am now enquiring whether the Cambridge U. press would undertake it. — C. was Darwin's University,4 & 3 of his sons are settled there, 2 as professors, but I doubt if they could afford it without help, & I am seeing what I could do by touting amongst wealthy patrons of Horticulture. Sr G. MacLeay has given me £300 to begin with. I suppose we must print at least 1500 copies, as the work will be wanted by both Botanists & Horticulturists. It gives the name, first authority, (book & page) & native country for every plant, and synonyms as far as possible — but the work must not be looked on as an authority for synonymy. You will find every published name &c., up to 1885, it professes no more. Of course established synonyms are entered as such & when possible referred to their proper species & this has as you may suppose given [enormous] trouble in the hundreds of cases where there are differences of opinion & where a plant has been referred to several Genera. All such cases are referred to Oliver & myself. In doing the Indian Orchids the work has been invaluable to me, how else could I have found all Reichenbach's species? published (like yours) in an infinity of periodicals.

I shall soon send you a sample page. Do you think you could get us any help towards publication in Australia? Oliver & I have devoted much time to it, of course gratuitously; so did John Ball, whose loss to Kew Herb. is deplorable.5

As for myself I am very well but getting old! I am just finishing the Orchids of Fl. Brit. Ind, a most unsatisfactory job that has cost me upwards of 3 years labor. Reichenbach's work is detestable, he did not codify a single genus, & his descriptions of species are so incomplete that I often have not known in what section of a Genus to put his species. Had not Bentham done the Genera of the Order I do not know where we should be. In doing the Indian I am in admiration of Benthams treatment of the Genera,6 especially seeing what a confused jumble of published materials he had to deal with, & the badness of Herbarium specimens.

As for the rest, the "Fl. Brit Ind."7 & the "Bot. Mag"8 take up all my time, except the Steudel9 — which I am revising after Jackson

Ever my dear Mueller

Sincerely yr

J D Hooker.

1
editorial addition — The letterhead is on the fragment.
2
An unknown amount of text missing.
3
Hooker is discussing the Index Kewensis compiled by B. D. Jackson, the first edition of which was published by Oxford University Press in four volumes, 1893-5.
4
Darwin had provided the funding that made compilation of the Index Kewensis possible.
5
Do you think … deplorable has been marked with double lines in the margin. Ball died on 21 October 1889.
6
In Bentham & Hooker (1862 -83), vol. 3, pp. 460-636.
7
J. Hooker (1875-97).
8
Curtis's botanical magazine, which Hooker continued to edit until 1904.
9
i.e. Index Kewensis, so called because it was seen as a successor to Steudel's Nomenclator (1840).

Please cite as “FVM-90-00-00g,” 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 23 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/90-00-00g