From Francis Petrie1    8 April 1895

VICTORIA INSTITUTE

OR PHILOSOPHICAL SOCY OF GT BRITAIN,

8, ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON.

W.C.

8 April 1894.2

Dear Baron von Mueller

I have this instant your valued remarks on Dr Woolls paper for which I need not say the President and Council will feel deeply grateful — These remarks will be put in print at once and the proofs submitted to you.

In the mean time there is one point on which the President and Council have had a special anxiety.

That is some errors have been urged in Dr Woolls paper which friends say he would have corrected had he lived to see the proof.

The President and Council have been very anxious you should correct on the authors behalf these minor verbal errors

In case you should not have a proof at hand I send another copy of Dr Wools paper.3

I am

Yours faithfully

F. Petrie

 

P.S.

I have your letter and am sure the Council will be very glad to send you extra copies of Dr Woolls paper, and of your comments — would you like 50 or more? of each — would you like them separate or bound together.4 — Is there a hope of a paper from you — we should so value it

1
MS is bound with the proof mentioned. This is annotated in an unknown hand on p. 1: 'on pp 2 & 3 are two of the so called errors we are told that there are other errors which he would not have left uncorrected and the Council were anxious his greatest friend should correct them all'. (Woolls died on 14 March 1893.) On p. 2, Woolls refers to W. Dampier's herbarium which he says 'is still preserved at Oxford and contains forty specimens, eighteen of which are figured in his Voyage (vol. III, ed. 1709), though few of them with the exception of Colutea Novae Hollandiae (Now Clianthus Dampieri), can be identified.' This sentence is marked by a line and '?' in the margin. On p. 3 Woolls refers to J. Banks's will in which he says Brown was bequeathed 'an annuity of £200, and also the use and enjoyment during his life of the library, herbarium, manuscripts, drawings, &c. He also bequeathed to F. Bauer (the eminent artist and companion of Brown who had been in Sir Joseph's employment for thirty years) an annuity of £300 on condition of his continuing to delineate the flowers at Kew.' A line and '?' straddles these two sentences in the margin. No other queries are marked, but later in the MS there are ticks in the margin beside several references to M's work. The paper was eventually published, together with the discussion it engendered at the meeting at which it was read, in Journal of the transactions of the Victoria Institute (1900), vol. 32, pp. 106-40. In the published version, the passage referring to Dampier appears unchanged, while the second marked passage has undergone two extremely minor changes that do not affect the sense in any way.
2
The date '1894' is printed as part of the letterhead. M's annotation suggests, however, that the letter was written in 1895 and that Petrie forgot to alter the printed date. So, too, does the fact that Woolls' paper was not read to the Victoria Insitute until 21 January 1895 (J. trans. Victoria Inst. [1902], vol. 32, p. 106).
3
In the bound collection (C32) of Woolls' papers in the Library, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, there is a second, unmarked set of proofs of this paper, to which has been added a typeset note recording Woolls' death. This note was not included in the final published version of the paper.
4
M's comments were published together with Woolls' paper; see B00.13.01.

Please cite as “FVM-95-04-08,” 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 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/95-04-08