To Joseph Hooker   28 March 1893

28/3/93.¹

Your letter, just received, dear Sir Joseph, is a source of great pleasure to me, especially as it shows your continued interest in my own workings here, and as it is e² further evidence of the amazing amount of research of originality, which mental freshness you still carry on uninterruptedly.

The great index nominum plantarum universalis will be a crowning of the monument of your scientific activity for all times.³

Now I come to a suddenly arising subject, which concerns me greatly, and which is to some extent explained by the enclosed print. Quite unexpectedly and without the slightest reference to me before, nor with any explanatory words Mr Bailey sent me last week in type writing a circular in which he announces his intention to publish a Supplementary volume to Bentham's Flora Australiensis.⁴ This encroachment on my official position is so grave and unwarented, that I must hasten to bring it under your notice and ask for some protection from yourself, more especially so, as you were the most intimate friend of the author of fl. Australiensis. You will see by the preface to the 7th vol., that Bentham did not want the Flora supplemented, just as little as I desire that any one should continue my fragmenta. He only calls on me to give a synopsis of additions,⁵ and for such I have worked daily since 1864!

When the intention of Bailey was promulgated in Brisbane before it became even known here, Mr Tryon, the Sub-Director & Entomologist of the Museum there, wrote a splendid article for one of the Brisbane journals, setting clearly forth my position and claims for the continuing of Benthams flora, saying that 95 pr/cent of the additions were mine!⁶ Mr Tryon was never a Correspondent of mine, so he acted as a true Son of Science on his own feelings of justice, which revolted against this extraordinary proposition, which as a "coup" was suddenly directed against me and takes me unaware! I feel this all the more, as I drew Bailey myself first into his botanic path. I met him first1874⁷ in his fathers nursery of plant near Adelaide, but during my 5 years stay as a Settler, who bought land and came for his health in S. Austr he never came a single time to me for any information, though I named several plants during those years for his father, who was an excellent English Gardener. The latter returned in the latter[s]⁸ fiftier years to England and the present B. went to New Zealand, where he was gardening before even Sir Jul Haast and Sir James Hector could explore the N.Z. alps. You know, that he entirely missed the glorious chance of being with ease and anyhow a discoverer of N.Z plants during the several years of his early stay in N. Z., when the Alps and other places rich in endemic vegetation became accessible. I emphasise this, because I wish to prove, that when he came as a Horticulturist to Brisbane, he only — inspired by my correspondence and aided by my knowledge became a Botanist.

You will further see, that his name appears in the Flora Australiensis only at the end of the sixth vol., though I spent no end of time to aid his studies, named plants for him, sent my works and allowed him, when he had a few novelties to spare in some instances the authority, when he had not even fixed the genus. Moreover, he had, when Mr Walter Hill left the botanic Garden, the full use of his very large collections of dried plants, named by me since 1855! No doubt, he, Mr Bailey is diligent and is talented, but for vascular plants little was left for him to be done in Q.L.,⁹ and his merits are mainly in the discovery of numerous evasculares, altho' I had also through my Collectors and through Amateurs very numerous Cryptogams from QL. The Acotyledonar Flora is there in the littoral mountain-regions very rich and he had splendid chances for access there first to them.

It will now be for you, dear Sir Joseph, whether as Bentham['s]¹⁰ trustee, you will allow the continuation of the Flora in Brisbane and my Department being placed in undeserved humiliation. Further it should be ascertaine[d]¹¹ whether the heirs of Lovell Reeve are willing as Business Men to give Mr Bailey the write¹² to continue the Flora, the subject involving also money-consideration. Who the Botanists are to call on him, with utter indifference to myself, to continue so great a work as Bentham's Mr Bailey takes great care not to mention. Moore, Maiden, Tate, Holtze, [De]ndy are not among them! Woolls is just dead and would doubtless have stood up publicly, as he was not a Governm Officer. The RS.¹³ of N. S W. and the L.S.¹⁴ of Sidney¹⁵ disapprove of Brisbane becoming so to say the place where the additions be published, and wish Melbourne (during my lifetime I suppose) to continue the centre of Austral bot. researches.

The idea in Brisbane seems to be, to pick with the Help of the Second Census all the additional species out, discovered since 1853, and in the same way to appropriate by excerption my litterary property without permission and in hurtful opposition to me and my little Department, which still continues with very slender means and at the greatest personal sacrifices vigorously its work, in our clime necessarily to a large extent rural!

Over ⅞ of QL. Mr Bailey never travelled yet, nor in any of the other colonies worth speaking of though railways and coaches and roads are there for him almost everywhere while I had at my travelling time to do it all on foot or horse on 30 000 [mi]les lines for 12 years! His proper province is to write another Q. L. Flora, after he has seen more of his own flora. I am satisfied, that more than half of the Australian species he has never even seen, much less studied in their native hounts.¹⁶

May I then, dear Sir Joseph, ask for your valuable Counsels and powerful support. I have no doubt, that the leaders of botanic science here will rally round their Australian Nestor and Leader, but support from you and Kew would be a great help indeed! I wonder where in Brisbane the money is to come from particularly now after the terrific floods to the relief fund of which I subscribed three times here already,¹⁷ to print the Flora, and after Bailey's assertion, that QL. was last year already too poor to subscribe to the antarctic fund, when thereby new trades and industries would be created. I think it best, to write a volume entitled: "Plants, discovered since the publication of Bentham's Flor Australiensis." That will be a fulfillment of our departed illustrious friends last wish so far.¹⁸

Mr Kirk sought my support for a new Flora of N.Z. I have only advised the issue of a new edition of your Handbook.¹⁹

You found it also advantageous, not yet to supplement B. and your genera,²⁰ as delay is gain for the supplement.