To Casimir de Candolle   4 September 1893

4/9/93.

 

Your touching letter,1 just received, dear M. De Candolle, will be preserved among my most precious documents. Your letter to Mr Hall2 has been forwarded; and you may imagine, how proud the young Naturalists will be, when read to them as direct coming from the Successor of A. P. and Alph. D.C., and what an inspiring effect this communication of yours will have! The picture will receive the foremost place of honor in my study-room. — Pray convey to the members of the Candollean family my appreciation of their sentiments in regard of the tribute, paid by me to the memory of your incomparable father. His wish, now reiterated by yourself, that I should elaborate the Myoporinae from vastly accumulated material of recent times, will be fulfilled, so soon as I am more advanced with the supplemental volume of the Flora Australiensis, the early completion of which has been urged on me here.3 I shall consider it a great privilege, thus to share for a small extent in the great opus, which for ever will remain together with the celebrated prodromus4 the mark of reference in phyto-systematic.

Reverently your

Ferd. von Mueller.

1
Letter not found. This was evidently the letter of 25 July 1893 to which de Candolle referred in is annotation on M to C. de Candolle, 13 June 1893.
2
Presumably a leader of the Surrey Hills Field Club, the young members of which had written a letter of sympathy to de Candolle on the death of his father; see M to C. de Candolle, 13 June 1893. Possibly R. Hall, a member of the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria whose address was Edgar Road in the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill, adjacent to Surrey Hills.
3
Neither M's supplement to the Flora australiensis nor his promised monograph on the Myoporinae for A. L. P. P. de Candolle (1878-96) was ever published.
4
A. P. de Candolle (1823-73).

Please cite as “FVM-93-09-04,” 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 26 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/93-09-04