20/10/93
Only through your kind letter of yesterday, dear Sir James, I became aware that you had passed through Melbourne on your homeway to N.Z.1, otherwise I would not have foregone the pleasure of calling on you. Indeed I asked my Assistant to watch the daily Journals, (which I have never time to read), so that I might be informed timely of your being here. I never was a Candidate for any Club, as my time and my means are always severely taxed, and as I live so far off from the Metropolis, being an hon. permanent Member of the German Club here.
I rejoyced, that the Adelaide-Meeting went on so splendidly, to which success you so largely contributed. I would have been very glad indeed to have had a chance to have shared in it, but the bronchial catarrh from which I chronically suffered and which became pleuritically complicated made travelling for me at the time impossible unless at the peril of my life. My coffers were packed. I thus missed also the opportunity of bidding simultaneously a last farewell to the Central Austr vegetion,2 which I could have reached by rail,3 and which I first unfolded by a private expedition of of4 my own in 1851,5 though I was exploring on the Murray-River already in 1848.
Always regardfully
your Ferd von Mueller
You and Lady Hector will find Mrs Alexander a high minded person, and her plan of forming a Salon also in Wellington deserves support6
Hector had been attending the 5th Congress of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Adelaide, 25 September-2 October 1893, at which he was President of Section C, Geology and Mineralogy.
vegetation?
The Central Australian railway extended as far as Oodnadatta, SA, by 1891. Alternatively, M may have thought to join the post-Congress excursion to Broken Hill, also by that date linked by railway to Adelaide.
of repeated.
In October 1851, M botanized in the Flinders Ranges, SA, as far north as Wlpena Pound.
Possibly the Mrs Armstrong, a member of the Victorian Institute of Journalists, then residing at Napier, NZ, who was elected a member of the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand institute of Journalists on 5 December 1893 (Evening post (Wellington), 6 December 1893, p. 2).
Please cite as “FVM-93-10-20,” 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