18/10/91.
Let me offer, venerable and illustrious friend, my best felicitation to the bestowal of the order "Pour le Mérite", and I rejoice that thus the highest scientific distinction in Prussia has been conferred on you as so worthy a recipient! It is also very gratifying, that you keep mentally so fresh, and I trust that you neither suffer from bodily ailing. As said before, I wish you will attain a Chevreulian age!1 Of the "Acacias"2 not more than 13 Decades appeared hitherto, because of 70 species, nowhere hitherto figured, I have not yet either the flowers or the fruits, and I have never illustrated pictorially a plant unless I could give the analysis from the flower-bud to the embryo. The expedition, sent on my suggestion by Sir Th Elder through the one yet unknown great Austral. Desert will likely bring more material of Eremophila and Myoporum. The Explorers have just arrived in W.A. not finding any water for 34 successive days!3 There is only one similar occurrence, Gerhard Rolfs in the Lybian Desert. Let me express my best thanks for sending me the highly important volume on Melastomaceae by the excellent Cogniaux.4 If only all other orders under your and M. Casimir D.C.5 auspices could be brought out in a similar almost exhaustive manner. The issue of the lithographic illustrations requires here much vigilance on my part. The delineator just made a drawing of Salsola Kali with a hemicyclic embryo.
With regardful remembrance your
Ferd von Mueller.
Acacia
Eremophila
Melastomaceae
Myoporum
Salsola Kali
The French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul died aged 102 in 1889.
The first decade was issued by March 1887 (B87.13.04), and the thirteenth, the last, was ready for distribution in August 1888 (B88.13.01).
See the telegram sent by the leader of the Elder Exploring Expedition, David Lindsay, to the SA Branch of the Royal Geographical Society, Age, 15 October 1891, p. 6.
Cogniaux (1891).
Casimir de Candolle.
Please cite as “FVM-91-10-18,” 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