Regardfully yours: selected correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller

Few people outside the botanical world have probably heard of Ferdinand von Mueller, and it may therefore come as a surprise that he is rated important enough for a multi-volume "life and letters". For Australian historians of science, however, he is that country's outstanding nineteenth-century figure, who successfully overcame the handicaps of its geographical isolation to achieve a renown that was emphatically international. What is more, like so many of his contemporary counterparts in Europe and America, he conducted a correspondence of heroic dimensions, much of which is invaluable for the picture it provides of the day-today concerns and constraints of a leading scientist-cum-administrator in a colonial outpost at that period, otherwise concealed behind the bare facade of his published work. Born plain Muiller at Rostock in Mecklenburg in 1825, one of the nine children of a customs officer, von Mueller owed his introduction to botany, like so many in that era, to an apprenticeship in pharmacy. Developing a passion for collecting, he was soon yearning to follow the example of Alexander von Humboldt in investigating the flora of little-known areas in distant corners of the globe. In 1847, armed with a doctorate from the University of Kiel, and on the then-familiar pretext of requiring a warm climate to avert suspected tuberculosis (but perhaps also on account of the tricky political situation in Schleswig-Holstein, to which the family had moved on his mother's widowhood), he emigrated to Australia with two of his sisters. Once there, he promptly Anglicized his name and, though forever undisguisedly German both in writing and in speech, had the luck to land the post of Government Botanist in the newly-independent colony of Victoria. Over the next forty-three years he energetically fostered the further exploration of Australia and New Guinea, building the Phytologic Museum in Melbourne into a world-class herbarium in the process, partly by extensive exchanges with botanists in other countries. For some of those years he also occupied the decidedly hot seat of Director of Melbourne's Botanic Gardens. A pivotal figure in the country's intellectual life more generally, he had a major hand in the founding of several of its key scientific institutions. Among the many honours bestowed on him before his death in 1896 were several European knighthoods, a Wuirttemberg barony and the coveted Royal Medal of the Royal Society in London. Mueller was one of the most prodigious correspondents of all time. An …