Bringing Science to the Public: Ferdinand von Mueller and Botanical Education in Victorian Victoria

Summary

Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–96), the German-born Government Botanist of Victoria from 1853 until his death, and concurrently Director of the Melbourne Botanic Garden from 1857 until 1873, was a prolific systematic botanist, but also heavily involved in public educational activities. He conceived of the Garden as an educative place of recreation, but ultimately lost control over it. His loss did not stop his popular writing and lecturing, especially in areas related to the application of botany in horticulture, agriculture, and forestry. The structure of his introductory school text—very different from the intensely logical grammar-like botany texts of the period—owed much to his political masters, but it is characterized by careful attention to language and locality. Mueller's work represents a consistent and pervasive example of attention to the ‘public understanding of science’ that resonates with the concerns of early twenty-first-century funders of scientific research.

Notes

¹Ferdinand von Mueller [hereafter FM] to William Thistleton-Dyer, 25 May 1885, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Kew Correspondence, Australia, Mueller [hereafter RBGKM], 1882–90, f. 148.

³ http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/PublicEngagement/ActivitiesAndFundingForResearchers/ SeniorMediaFellowships/default.htm (accessed 21 February 2005).

²The Royal Society, The Public Understanding of Science; Report of a Royal Society ad hoc group endorsed by the Council of The Royal Society (London, 1985). The COPUS mission is quoted from http://www.copus.org.uk/grants_about.html (accessed 22 February 2005).

⁴ http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/PublicEngagement/ActivitiesAndFundingForResearchers/ PublicCommunicationTrainingFunds (accessed 21 February 2005).

⁵ http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/ (accessed 21 February 2005). For a critique of the initiative and its implementation, see G. Pearson ‘The Participation of Scientists in Public Understanding of Science Activities: the Policy and Practice of The UK Research Councils’, Public Understanding of Science, 10 (2001), 121–37.

⁶The relevant NSF programmes are described at http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div = ESIE (accessed 21 February 2005).

⁷Quoted from the on-line edition of Communicating Science to the Public: A Handbook for Researchers, http://www.nserc.gc.ca/seng/how1en.htm (accessed 21 February 2005).

⁸CNRS Annual Report, 1999, 10, downloaded from http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/55.htm (accessed 29 March 2005); http://www.rcom-bremen.de/English/English/Z6_Public_understanding_of_science.html#Section911 (accessed 29 March 2005).

⁹The rapid development of science centres in Europe is described on the Web site of the European Collaborative for Science, Industry & Technology Exhibitions (ECSITE), especially the articles by Walter Staveloz and John Durant in the ‘Who are we’ section (http://www.ecsite.net/new/index.asp, accessed 22 February 2005). An account of its founding can be found in M. Quin, ‘The Interactive Science and Technology Project—the Nuffield Foundation's Launchpad for a European Collaborative’, International Journal of Science Education, 13 (1991), 569–73. See also L. D. Dierking, J. J. Luke and K. S. Buchner, ‘Science and Technology Centres—Rich Resources for Free-Choice Learning in a Knowledge-Based Society’, International Journal of Technology Management, 25 (2003), 441–59.

¹⁰For reviews and bibliographies of learning science from informal sources, see A. M. Lucas, ‘Scientific Literacy and Informal Education’, Studies in Science Education, 10 (1983), 1–36; Paulette McManus, ‘Topics in Museums and Science Education’, Studies in Science Education, 20 (1992), 157–82; John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking (eds), Public Institutions for Personal Learning: Establishing a Research Agenda (Washington, DC, 1995); G. E. Hein, Learning in Museums (London, 1998); J. H. Falk, Free-choice Science Education: How we Learn Science Outside of School (New York, 2001); S. G. Paris (ed.) Perspectives in Object Centered Learning in Museums (Mahwah, NJ, 2002); L. J. Rennie and G. F. Williams ‘Science Centres and Scientific Literacy: Promoting a Relationship with Science’, Science Education, 86 (2002), 706–26. The journal Public Understanding of Science publishes regular bibliographies.

¹¹For more evidence that scientists’ relatively recent involvement with popularization is primarily to gain more public support in times of shrinking budgets, see R. Grundmann and J-P. Cavaille, ‘Simplicity in Science and Its Publics’ Science as Culture, 9 (2000), 353–89.

¹²For Canada, http://www.nserc.gc.ca/seng/how1en.htm (accessed 23 February 2005); for Royal Society, http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id = 1140 (accessed 8 March 2005); Bodmer Committee (note 2), 24, 34 (emphasis in original).

¹³Michael Faraday, A Course of Six Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle; … Delivered during the Christmas Holidays of 1860–1. Edited by W. Crookes (London, 1861); Michael Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle [Dover edition] (Mineola NY, 2002). T. H. Huxley, ‘On a piece of chalk: a lecture to working men’ delivered during the Norwich meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (published in Macmillan's Magazine, 18 (1868), 396–408), was reprinted during his lifetime in collections (e.g. T. H. Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (London, 1870), 192–222), and later as a separate illustrated edition: T. H. Huxley, On a Piece of Chalk. Edited & with an introduction & notes by Loren Eiseley. Drawings by Rudolf Freund. (New York, 1967). Each is also available on the Internet: for example http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1860Faraday-candle.html and http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE8/Chalk.html, respectively.

¹⁴While the emphasis was on advancing science and increasing support for science, public engagement was a concomitant. For example, Archibald Liversidge argued that the formation of an Australian Association for the Advancement of Science would ‘tend to stimulate all classes and disseminate a taste for all branches of knowledge’ (quoted by Roy MacLeod ‘Organising science under the Southern Cross’ in The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australasia 1888–1988, edited by Roy MacLeod (Melbourne, 1988), 19–39 (31). For the British Association for the Advancement of Science, see Richard Yeo ‘Scientific Method and the Image of Science 1831–1891’ in The Parliament of Science, edited by Roy MacLeod and Peter Collins (Northwood, 1981), 65–88 (especially 75–81); Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1981), especially Chapter 3. For the American Association for the Advancement of Science, see Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Michael M. Sokal and Bruce V. Lewenstein, The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (New Brunswick, 1999), especially Kohlstedt's chapter, 7–49, and the 1880 quotation from one of the founders, William Barton Rogers, then President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 35.

¹⁵J. R. Topham, ‘Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: a Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 31A (2000), 559–612; Anne Secord, ‘Botany on a plate; pleasure and the power of pictures in promoting early nineteenth-century scientific knowledge’, Isis, 93 (2002), 28–57; Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Anne Rasmussen (eds) La Science Populaire dans la Presse et l'edition, XIXe et XXe Siècles (Paris, 1997), especially the articles in the section on national styles and the development of scientific popularization, 143–255.

¹⁶For a recent study placing mechanics institutes in the context of other sources of learning science out of school, see Erin McLaughlin-Jenkins, ‘Walking the Low Road: the Pursuit of Scientific Knowledge in Late Victorian Working-Class Communities’, Public Understanding of Science, 12 (2003), 147–166. See also Philip C. Candy and John Laurent (eds) Pioneering Culture: Mechanics’ Institutes and Schools of Arts in Australia (Adelaide, 1994) and P. Baragwanath, If These Walls Could Speak: a Social History of the Mechanics’ Institutes of Victoria (Melbourne, 2000).

¹⁷For museums and out of school education in England, see, for example, Lynne Barber, The Heyday of Natural History (London, 1980), especially chapter 11; in the United States, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘Curiosities and cabinets: Natural history museums and education on campus’, Isis, 79 (1988), 405–26; in Australia, Ann Moyal, ‘A Bright & Savage Land’: Scientists in Colonial Australia (Sydney, 1986), especially pages 94–101, and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, ‘Australian Museums of Natural History: Public Priorities and Scientific Initiatives in the 19th Century’, Historical Records of Australian Science, 5 (1983), 1–29; for aquaria in Hamburg, Germany, Lynn K. Nyhart, ‘Civic and Economic Zoology in Nineteenth Century Germany: the “Living Communities” of Karl Möbius’, Isis, 89 (1988), 605–30 (625–26). For a contemporary account, see Edward Forbes, On the Educational Uses of Museums (London, 1853). Note that the sense of ‘public’ may have been restricted in some museums: S. J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Placing Nature: Natural History Collections and Their Owners in Nineteenth-Century Provincial England’, British Journal for the History of Science, 35 (2002), 291–311.

¹⁸For example, J. Howard, ‘“Physics and Fashion”: John Tyndall and his Audiences in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 35A (2004), 729–58; D. Knight, ‘Scientific Lectures: a History of Performance’ Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 27 (2002), 217–24; Frank A. J. L. James, ‘“Never Talk About Science, Show It to Them”: The Lecture Theatre of the Royal Institution’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 27 (2002), 225–29, discusses two of the longest running lecture series, the Friday Evening Discourses and the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution.

¹⁹In what follows, we have drawn heavily upon the material assembled by the Mueller Correspondence Project. Items that have been published are cited from R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora and J. H. Voigt, Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, 3 vols (Bern, 1998–2005). [For volume 3, Monika Wells is an additional editor.] Material awaiting electronic publication has been cited from the collection that holds the original.

²⁰‘Annual Report of the Government Botanist and Director of the Botanic Garden’. 24 October 1858 (Home et al. (note 19), I, 420).

²¹T. H. Huxley assisted by H. N. Martin, A Course of Practical Instruction in Elementary Biology (London, 1875); T. H. Huxley, Physiography; an Introduction to the Study of Nature (London, 1878). For the respective roles of Huxley and Gladstone in administering education in London see Dena Coleman, ‘The Life and Work of John Hall Gladstone (1827–1902): with Particular Reference to His Contribution to Elementary Science Education at the London School Board’. Ph.D. thesis, King's College London, University of London, 1991.

²²[a report on plants collected in the southern regions of the Duchy of Schleswig]. Certificate from Universität Kiel, 2 August 1847 (Home et al. (note 19), I, 99. A version of the thesis was later published in two parts as ‘Breviarum Plantarum Ducatus Slesvicensis Austro-Occidentalis’ Flora, 36 (1853), 473–80 and 489–503.

²³Home et al. (note 19), 1, figure 4, 104.

²⁴For details of FM's appointment in Victoria see Sara Maroske and Helen Cohn, ‘“Such ingenious birds”: Ferdinand Mueller and William Swainson in Victoria’, Muelleria, 7 (1992), 529–53. Honours, awards and memberships of societies up to about 1890 are listed in abbreviated Latin in FM's four-page pamphlet ‘Liber Baro Ferdinandus de Mueller’, a copy of which is enclosed with FM to Lord Kelvin, 23 April 1893, Royal Society, Miscellaneous correspondence, vol 16, f. 31. For a full list of honours, society memberships and the like, see ‘Appendix B: Orders, Offices, Affiliations and Sundry Honours of Ferdinand Mueller’, Home et al. (note 19), III, 838–857.

²⁵See ‘Mueller bibliography’, Home et al. (note 19), I, 566–685.

²⁶FM to E. M. Holmes, 20 June 1894, Linnean Society Archives, Holmes Correspondence. Home et al. (note 19, I, 13, 39) estimate that his total correspondence amounted to some 300,000 items, with about 5% recovered by the project.

²⁷P. S. Short, ‘Politics and the purchase of private herbaria by the National Herbarium of Victoria’, in History of Systematic Botany in Australasia, edited by P. S. Short (South Yarra, 1990), 5–12; Sara Maroske, Doris Sinkora and Helen M. Cohn, ‘Ferdinand von Mueller's Library’, Botanic Magazine, 4 (1993), 17–25.

²⁸For general biographies, see M. Willis, By Their Fruits: A Life of Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, Botanist and Explorer (Sydney, 1949) and E. Kynaston, A Man on Edge: a Life of Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller (Ringwood, 1981), but beware of some of the interpretations. C. Daley, Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, KCMG, MD, FRS: Botanist, Explorer and Geographer (Melbourne, 1924) is a usually reliable short memoir. The introductions to Home et al. (note 19), I, 9–58, II, 7–50 and III, –45discuss the broad structure of his life and work. For aspects of his private life, see Andrew Brown-May and Sara Maroske, ‘Breaking into the quietude: re-reading the personal life of Ferdinand von Mueller’, Public History Review, 3 (1994), 36–63. See also The Scientific Savant in Nineteenth Century Australia edited by R. W. Home (Canberra, 1997), and the articles in the commemorative volume of The Victorian Naturalist, 113 (1996), 128–231.

²⁹Thomas Balmain to FM, 13 August 1867 (Home et al. (note 19), I, 318.); Augustus C. Gregory, ‘Journal of the North Australian Exploring Expedition’ Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 28 (1858), 1–135.

³⁰FM, 5 September 1853, ‘Report of the Government Botanist’ (in Home et al., note 19), I, 164.

³¹FM, The Objects of a Botanic Garden in Relation to Industries (Melbourne, 1871), 1, 6.

³² Objects (note 31), 16.

³³ Objects (note 31), 18; the views of Robert Hunt are discussed in David Layton, Science for the People (London, 1973), Chapter 6, where this reason for learning science is contrasted with others given by contemporaries; for Layton's use of Alexander Pope's line (Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 331), see 138.

³⁴ Objects (note 31), 21.

³⁵‘Report of the Board upon the Botanic Gardens’, 14 December 1871. (Home et al. (note 19), II, 768).

³⁶‘Report of the Board’ (note 35), 769, 770.

³⁷See, for example, FM to J. D. Hooker, 9 February 1871, RBGKM, 1871–81, f. 6.

³⁸Victoria—Parliamentary Papers—No. 105, 1861–62, ‘Annual Report of the Government Botanist and Director of the Botanic Garden’, 6. Subsequent to FM submitting this report to the Chief Secretary on 10 March 1862, a deputation of nurserymen presented a petition against the practice of distributing plants from the gardens, and met the Chief Secretary and FM on 14 May. The position as described in FM's report was then regularized as a set of rules. See FM to John O'Shannassy 14 May 1862 (Home et al. (note 19), II, 143–48 and notes thereto).

³⁹Plan forming part of the ‘Annual Report of the Government Botanist and Director of the Botanic Garden’, in Victoria—Parliamentary Papers—Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly 1869 (No. 21), report dated 14 September 1868, but presented to Parliament 8 July 1869.

⁴⁰Report, 1858 (note 20, 417).

⁴¹Report 1858 (note 20, 417); Report 1868 (note 39, 1).

⁴²Report 1858 (note 20), 418; number of labels from Annual report 1861–62 (note 38), 4.

⁴³Victoria–Parliamentary Papers. No 30. Botanical and Domain Gardens. Annual report of the Curator of the Botanical and Domain Gardens, 23 May 1874, 3.

⁴⁴Annual Report 1868 (note 39), 5.

⁴⁵ Objects (note 31), 22.

⁴⁶FM reiterated the estimate of an average of 5000 visitors on a Sunday afternoon in his response to the report of the Board of Inquiry, FM to Charles Duffy, 6 February 1872 (Public Record Office of Victoria [hereafter PROV] A72/2332, unit 596, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department). The annual estimate is given in his Annual Report 1858 (note 20, 420); Population data from V. H. Arnold, Victorian Yearbook 1973 (Melbourne, 1973), 1069.

⁴⁹‘The Botanic Garden’, Melbourne Leader, 15 April 1882. The article is not signed but the unpaginated cutting in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew has been annotated by FM: ‘Written, I believe, by the horticultural editor himself, a first rate British gardener’ (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Archives Miscellaneous Reports, Melbourne Botanic Gardens). The horticultural editor was William Elliott (Richard Aitken and Michael Looker (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (South Melbourne, 2002), 199–200.

⁴⁷Helen Cohn and Sarah Maroske, ‘Relief from duties of minor importance: the removal of Baron von Mueller from the Directorship of the Melbourne Botanic Garden’, Victorian Historical Journal, 67 (1996), 103–27.

⁴⁸Report, 1874 (note 43), 5; William Guilfoyle, Annual Report on the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Government House Grounds and Domain (Melbourne, 1876), 16.

⁵⁰FM to William Thistleton-Dyer, 1 January 1881, RBGKM, 1871–81, f. 327.

⁵¹FM to the Chief Secretary James Francis, 2 October 1873, and associated minutes of Francis and the Undersecretary, W. H. Odgers (PROV, D73/12765, unit 1022, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department).

⁵²‘Herbarium der Schleswig-Holstein-Lauenburgischen Flor’, exsiccatae, issued by Lars Hansen in 26 series of semicenturies, Flensburg, 1833–62; FM to Lars Hansen, 9 July 1844 (Home et al. (note 19), I, 82–86).

⁵³FM's intention was set out in FM to James Francis, 23 October 1873 (Home et al. (note 19), II, 694–95). Label details are from the third part, issued 1876, of the set of the Educational Collections of Victorian Plants in the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australian Manuscripts Collection, MSF 10867.

⁵⁴FM to James Francis, 23 October 1873 and associated minutes including FM to Thomas Ware, 11 December 1873 (Home et al., note 19, II, 695).

⁵⁵FM to Thomas Ware, 20 June 1874, and associated minutes, including FM to Ware, 13 July 1874. (PROV, E74/7989, unit 258, VPRS 3992/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department). By 1884 there were 212 ‘free libraries, athenaeums, or scientific, literary or mechanics institutes’ which ‘furnished returns to the Government’, reporting about 2,800,000 visitors per year (Henry Hayter, Handbook to the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne, 1884), 40. The colony's population at the 1881 census was 862, 346.

⁵⁶Chief Secretary's Office Circular, September 1874 (PROV, Unit 37, pp. 1333–5, VPRS 1187 outwards correspondence, VA 860 Chief Secretary's Office).

⁵⁷For Wesley College, A. H. S. Lucas to Chief Secretary, 20 July 1885 (PROV C85/7269, unit 258, VPRS 3992/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department); for Church of England Grammar School, J. H. Thompson to Chief Secretary 13 May 1887 (PROV J87/4465, unit 258, VPRS 3992 inwards registered correspondence, VA 860 Chief Secretary's Office (only parts 1 and 2 were available); for Christchurch School, FM to William Pye, 28 October 1874 (PROV H75/4522, unit 846, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department); for Shepparton Mechanics Institute, George Graham to Chief Secretary, 26 January 1886 (PROV F86/790, unit 258, VPRS 3992/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department); for Royal Commission, H. Shillinglaw to Under Secretary, 10 February 1886 (PROV E86/1376, unit 258, VPRS 3992/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department); for Ormond College, Pharmaceutical Society, Technological Museum, Indian and Colonial Exhibition and FM's office, FM to T. R. Wilson, 9 June 1885 (PROV, C85/504, unit 258, VPRS 3992 inwards registered correspondence, VA 860 Chief Secretary's Office).

⁵⁸FM to Thomas Ware, 20 June 1874 (note 55).

⁵⁹Undersecretary's minute on FM's letter of 20 June 1874 (note 55).

⁶⁰ Educational Collections, note 53.

⁶¹Major works not further mentioned below include Iconography of Australian Species of Acacia and Cognate Genera (Melbourne, 1887–88); Systematic Census of Australian Plants, with Chronologic, Literary and Geographic Annotations (Melbourne, 1882, second edition 1889); Index perfectus ad Caroli Linnaei species plantarum (Melbourne, 1880).

⁶² Plants Indigenous to the Colony of Victoria, Lithograms (Melbourne, 1864–65), unpaginated Introduction. However, when used alone the illustrations could not have fulfilled all of FM's purpose: the text accompanying the plates does not identify the order (family) to which the genus belongs.

⁶³FM to William Pye, note 57.

⁶⁴FM to Robert Ramsay, 28 June 1875 (PROV, G75/7793, unit 880, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department).

⁶⁵M to Robert Ramsay 9 March 1875 (PROV, G75/2782, unit 1022, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department); FM to James MacPherson, 11 March 1876 and 21 March 1876, FM to Undersecretary, 3 August 1876 and Undersecretary to Government Printer, 11 August 1876 (PROV, K76/2317 and J76/2668, unit 1022, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department) and associated minutes.

⁶⁶FM to William Odgers, 12 August 1876 and associated minutes (Home et al. (note 19), III, 78–79.

⁶⁷The Chief Secretary's minute is written on a page of the proof, from which the extract of the text given here is taken. The Government Printer's annotation is associated (PROV, 76/K13910, unit 883, VPRS 3991, VA 860 Chief Secretary's Office).

⁶⁸FM to Joseph Hooker, 20 February 1877, RBGKM, 1871–81, f. 192.

⁶⁹Joseph Hooker to FM, 30 May 1877, National Herbarium of Victoria, RB MSS M3.

⁷⁰FM to Graham Berry, 5 July 1877 (PROV, M77/7745, unit 982, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department).

⁷¹E. E. Pescott, ‘Notes on Mueller's literary work’, Victorian Naturalist, 38 (1922), 98–102, 99.

⁷²FM, Introduction to Botanic Teachings at the Schools of Victoria (Melbourne, 1877), 4.

⁷³ Botanic Teachings (note 72), 14 (FM's emphasis).

⁷⁴ Botanic Teachings (note 72), 18, 20 (FM's emphasis).

⁷⁵David Morgan, Effie Best, Anthony Lee, John Nicholas and Michael Pitman (eds) Biological Science: the Web of Life (Canberra, 1967), 79–85. The associated laboratory exercise used Myrtaceae genera and species very similar to the way Mueller introduced his book. For a brief history of the Web of Life course, see A. M. Lucas, ‘The Development of a Curriculum Monopoly in Australian Secondary Schools: Biological Science: The Web of Life. 1. Origins and Spread’ and ‘… 2. Research and Comment’, Journal of Biological Education, 14 (1980), 15–29; 167–74.

⁷⁶ Botanic Teachings (note 72), 3.

⁷⁷George Bentham, Handbook of the British flora … (London, 1858), 1–33; George Bentham, Flora Australiensis, 7 vols (London, 1863–78), I, pp. i–xxxv. D. E. Allen (‘George Bentham's Handbook of the British flora: from controversy to cult’, Archives of Natural History, 30 (2003), 224–36, 224) comments that ‘to present-day eyes … the 33 pages expounding botanical terminology would probably deter all but the ultra-conscientious’; William Guilfoyle, First Book of Australian Botany Specially Designed for the use of Schools (Melbourne, 1878). Daniel Oliver's Lessons in Elementary Botany (London, 1864), prepared from John Stevens Henslow's notes, starting as it does with the Beetonesque ‘[g]ather first of all, a specimen of the Common Buttercup’, invites comparison with Botanic Teachings. However, Oliver's text, while basing the pedagogic material on common plants, is still basically a ‘grammar’, with the first hundred or so pages teaching a structured vocabulary to assist with the description of representative types of the natural orders that comprises part II of the text. For a discussion of Henslow's heuristic approach to teaching, see Science for the People (note 33), chapter 3.

⁷⁸ Botanic Teachings (note 72), 5.

⁷⁹ Botanic Teachings (note 72), 28.

⁸⁰ Botanic Teachings (note 72), 43 (FM's emphasis). For an examination of mistletoe mimicry and a discussion of its evolution, see B. A. Barlow & D. Wiens, ‘Host–Parasite Resemblance in Australian Mistletoes—Case for Cryptic Mimicry’, Evolution, 31 (1977), 69–84.

⁸¹FM to Graham Berry, 23 May 1878 (PROV, O78/5295, unit 1022, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department); when William Guilfoyle attempted to have his First Book (note 77) ‘adopted’ as a text in Victorian schools, offering to provide them in bulk at a discount of 40%, his letter was minuted ‘it is useless to supply schools with works on subjects which the Department does not require to be taught’ (William Guilfoyle to Duncan Gilles, 6 August 1884, PROV, 84/26333, unit 596, VPRS central inwards registered correspondence, VA 714 Education Department). See also Ronald Frederick Baker, ‘The system of payment by results in Victorian elementary schools, 1864–1905’. Thesis (M.Ed.), University of Melbourne, 1978.

⁸²Frederick Bailey to John Anderson (Letter press copy book 2, 114–15, Queensland Herbarium, Indooroopilly, Queensland).

⁸³ Gardener's Chronicle, 6 October 1877, p. 440; Journal of Botany British and Foreign, New Series, 7 (1878), 26.

⁸⁴John Fairfax and Sons to FM, 21 August 1877 (PROV, M77/10009, unit 982, VPRS 3991/P, inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department). The ‘weeklies were especially important in remote areas without daily mail delivery’ (Victor Isaacs and Rod Kirkpatrick, Two Hundred Years of Sydney Newspapers: a Short History (North Richmond, 2003, 7), so the decision to serialize in this edition was a way of putting the contents in the hands of rural residents.

⁸⁵Government Printer's minute of 11 September 1877 on FM to William Odgers, 7 September 1877 (PROV, M77/10009, unit 982, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department).

⁸⁶FM to Graham Berry, 23 May 1878 (PROV, O78/5295, unit 1022, VPRS 3991/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department); Berry minuted his approval on 2 July 1878. FM, The Native Plants of Victoria, Succinctly Defined. Part 1 (Melbourne, 1879). FM explains and justifies the nature of his modifications, a redistribution of some of the monochlamydeous orders, on pp. xii–xiii.

⁸⁷Pescott (note 71), 101.

⁸⁸Frederick McCoy to FM, undated but probably June 1879, RBGKM, 1871–81, f. 238.

⁸⁹FM, Inaugural address, Report of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 2 (1890), 2.

⁹⁰Stephen Jeffries, ‘Alexander Von Humboldt and Ferdinand von Mueller's Argument for the Scientific Botanic Garden’, in The Scientific Savant (note 28), 301–10.

⁹¹C. Rasmussen, A Museum for the People: a History of Museum Victoria and its Predecessors 1854–2000 (Melbourne, 2001), 78.

⁹²FM to the Duke of Newcastle, 17 January 1860 (Home et al. (note 19), II, 72–73).

⁹³The Royal Society of Victoria, Report on the Resources of the Colony of Victoria Prepared by a Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria (Melbourne, 1860). FM was in addition responsible for the subcommittees that prepared the sections on ‘Indigenous vegetable productions’ (21–30) and ‘Agriculture and horticulture’ (31–54). The Royal Society of Victoria was not alone in its emphasis on applied science, but typical of other Australian scientific societies of this period (Ian Inkster and Jan Todd, ‘Support for the Scientific Enterprise’ in Australian Science in the Making, edited by R. W. Home (Cambridge, 1988) 102–32.)

⁹⁴FM, Select Plants, Readily Eligible for Industrial Culture or Naturalisation in Victoria with Indications of Their Native Countries and Some of Their Uses (Melbourne, 1876). Later editions were entitled Select Extra-tropical Plants Readily Eligible for Industrial Culture or Naturalisation, With … and appeared in editions published in India (Calcutta, 1880) [a facsimile of this edition is available (Dehra Dun, 1979)]; New South Wales (Sydney, 1881); the United States (Detroit, 1884); enlarged and revised Victorian editions (Melbourne, 1885, 1888, 1891, 1895), and translated into one German (Auswahl von aussertropischen Pflanzen, vorzüglich geeignet für industrielle Kulturen und zur Naturalisation, mit Angabe ihrer Heimathsländer und Nutzanwendung. (Neu-Süd-Wallis-Auflage (vergrössert). Government Printer: Sidney. 1881. Aus dem Englischen von Edmund Goeze.) (Kassel and Berlin, 1883) and two Portuguese editions (Diccionario de Plantas UteisProprias para Cultura Principalmente nas Regiões Extra-tropicaes com as Indicações da Patria de cada uma e de muitas das Applicações que d'ells se podem fazer (Portuguese translation by Dr. Julio Henriques) (Porto, 1905, 1932): the date 1929 on the title page of the second Portuguese edition does not reflect its actual publication on 15 April 1932 (information from M. Fátima A. M. Costa, Botany Librarian, University of Coimbra). There was also a French version, written jointly with C. Naudin (Manuel de l'Acclimateur ou Choix de Plantes Recommandées pour l'Agriculture, l'Industrie et la Médecine et Adaptées aux Divers Climats de l'Europe et des pays Tropicaux (Paris, 1887)).

⁹⁵The 1885 edition had sold out in six months (FM to Daniel Morris, 3 November 1886, RBGKM, 1882–90. ff. 205–206.) Copies of the 1888 edition were presented to the delegates to the Intercolonial Medical Congress held in Melbourne in 1889 (FM to Alfred Deakin, 22 December 1888 (PROV, R88/12611, unit 394, VPRS 3992/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department).

⁹⁶ Select Plants (note 94), iii. Similar wording was used in all editions, up to the last issued by FM in 1895. The same passage appears in the German translation (Auswahl von aussertropischen Pflanzen (note 93), iii–iv. The posthumous Portuguese translation of 1905 did not include a translation of FM's preface.

⁹⁷FM, ‘The Principal Timber Trees, Readily Eligible for Victorian Industrial Culture, with Indications of Their Native Countries, and Some of Their Technologic Uses’, Annual Report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria (1871), 29–58 was the first of the series. For details of the other three parts see his bibliography (note 25). Examples of newspaper and magazine publications include ‘Eligible Timber Trees’, Gardeners’ Monthly and Horticulturist 14, 37–39, 72–75, 108–12, 141–44, 168–73, February to June 1872 (Philadelphia); ‘Dr. Mueller on forest culture’, Gardeners’ Chronicle (1872), January 1872, 10–11, 43–44, 110–12 (London); ‘Plants eligible for Australian culture’, Sydney Mail new series, 7 September 1872, 295, and subsequent issues until 8 May 1875, 585. For pamphlets, see FM's bibliography (note 25).

⁹⁸Ellwood Cooper, Forest Culture and Eucalyptus Trees (San Francisco, 1876). There are two versions with identical publication details, one of 204 pages, the other with 621; three of FM's articles appeared in both. The shorter version is available electronically at http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c = moa;idno = AJQ9886.0001.001. Pescott (note 71), 102 considered the republication without FM's name on the title page as ‘one of the most disgraceful cases of plagiarism on record’. However, it seems that no deceit was involved: Cooper states in the preface to the shorter version that, through the US Consul-general in Melbourne, it was arranged that ‘the Baron would send copies in his possession provided that I would have them published at my own risk, in a connected form’ (6), and FM ‘was cheered by the generous action of an enlightened American, Mr. Ellwood Cooper … who deemed the publications … worthy of reissue in America’ (Select Plants … Victoria (note 94), iv.

⁹⁹ The editions are listed in note 94.

¹⁰¹FM to Joseph Hooker, 19 September 1884, RBGKM 1882–90, f. 117 (FM's emphases). Coincidently on the same day, Dr Dobson was writing to the Chief Secretary to urge him to ‘allow [Mueller] to expend this absurdly small sum [£170] in a book which cannot fail to impart a scientific stimulus’ [our emphasis] (Stanley Dobson to James Service, PROV, A84/8354, unit 59, VPRS 3992/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department).

¹⁰²FM to Joseph Hooker, 18 November 1884, RBGKM, 1882–90, f. 127.

¹⁰⁰FM, Key to the System of Victorian Plants, I (Melbourne, 1887–88), v. W. W. Spicer, A Handbook of the Plants of Tasmania (Hobart Town, 1878). See also F. S. Dobson, ‘Presidential Address’, Victorian Naturalist, 1 (1884), 41–44. There are frequent mentions of the need for, and progress of, the Key in the pages of the Victorian Naturalist in the following years. Not all members supported the publication and use of keys: the form was ‘condemned’ by the mycologist Daniel McAlpine, the lecturer in Biology at the University of Melbourne, recently arrived from Scotland (Victorian Naturalist, 2 (1885), 42).

¹⁰³FM to William Turner Thistleton-Dyer, 2 October 1886, RBGKM, 1882–90, ff. 199–200.

¹⁰⁴FM to William Turner Thistleton-Dyer, 17 October 1886 RBGKM, 1882–90, ff. 202–3. For an example of the complaints ‘in the public press’ see extracts of letters from ‘Student’ to the Editor of the Argus, 21 August 1886, 9 September 1886, and 21 September 1886, in Home et al. (note 19), III, 440, 443–444. FM was not without press supporters, however: see extracts of F. Dattari to the Editor of the Argus, 13 September 1886, in Home et al. (note 19), III, 444.

¹⁰⁵George Bentham (note 77), 33.

¹⁰⁶Spicer (note 100), 61.

¹⁰⁷ Key (note 100), 236.

¹⁰⁸ Key (note 100), vi, v.

¹⁰⁹FM, ‘Considerations of Phytographic Expressions and Arrangements’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 22 (1889), 187–204.

¹¹⁰FM to Henry Ridley, 29 March 1888, RBG Kew, Archives, Miscellaneous Correspondence, Mueller. Gardeners’ Chronicle, new series, 5 (1889), 466–67. G.L.G [George L. Goodale], ‘Review of Key to System of Victorian Plants vol. 1’, American Journal of Science, No. 221 (1880), 416–17.

¹¹¹ Key (note 100), 541–48.

¹¹²Angela Taylor, ‘Baron von Mueller and the Field Naturalists’ Tradition’, Victorian Naturalist, 113 (1996), 131–39, 134; Pescott (note 71), 100–101.

¹¹³ Key (note 100), v, v–vi, vii.

¹¹⁴ Key (note 100), vi.

¹¹⁵Note 109, 193, 194.

¹¹⁶Note 109, 194.

¹¹⁷The examples are taken from a list of over 80 terms in ‘Considerations of Phytographic Expressions’ (note 109), 198–200.

¹¹⁹ Key (note 100), xii, xi. The reviewer in the Gardeners’ Chronicle (note 110) was sceptical about introducing such terminological innovations in a work for beginners and amateurs rather than in an ‘advanced treatise, intended for experts’. The reviewer continued, ‘botanists would certainly expose themselves to ridicule if they spoke of a tail as a “basal attenuation”’, one of the terms in Mueller's list (note 109). Similarly, Goodale (note 110, 116) was sceptical, pointing out that some ‘zoological’ terms, such as ‘valve, lobe, membrane and filament’ had been retained.

¹¹⁸In addition to some common names for plants, FM is credited in the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary with coining ‘Eucalypt’, ‘alg’, and ‘fung’, the latter two treated as ‘rare’. ‘Fruitlet’ is listed as first used by others in 1882, even though FM used it in Botanic teachings (note 72), the source given for ‘Eucalypt’ (http://dictionary.oed.com/, accessed 20 March 2005).

¹²⁰FM, On the Advancement of the Natural Sciences through Ministers of the Christian Church, a Lecture, Delivered at the Presbyterian Church of West Melbourne, on the 6th August, 1877 (Melbourne, 1877). The Leichhardt lecture that resulted in the creation of the Ladies’ Leichhardt Search Expedition is reported in ‘Further Traces of Dr. Leichhardt's Party’ The Age, Melbourne, 23 December 1864, 5. For the numerous reported lectures on scientific subjects, see his bibliography (note 25).

¹²¹The educational functions of the exhibitions became established with London's Great Exhibition of 1851, even if some commentators were surprised at the serious way visitors responded: ‘The fact is, the Great Exhibition is to [the artisan classes] more of a school than a show … what was a matter of tedium, and became ultimately a mere lounge for gentle folks, is used as a place of instruction by the people’ (the author and social reformer Henry Mayhew quoted by Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, 1988), 19.

¹²²FM, ‘Wood samples’, Gardeners’ Chronicle, 20 October 1883, 505. He had previously used a more complex but less satisfactory version for the London Exhibition of 1862 (FM to William Thiselton-Dyer, RGBKM, 1882–90. ff. 29–30), using the solid form from the Amsterdam and Calcutta exhibitions of 1883.

¹²³FM to Joseph Hooker, 21 April 1873, RGBKM, 1871–81, ff. 85–86 (distillates); Kathleen M. Fennessy, ‘“Industrial Instruction” for the “Industrious Classes”: Founding the Industrial and Technological Museum, Melbourne’, Historical Records of Australian Science, 16 (2005), 45–64; FM to Redmond Barry, 10 September 1869 (PROV, unit 4 VPRS/P0 5486, Inward Correspondence. Official Letters, Miscellaneous, VA 913 Melbourne Public Library) and FM to Charles Bright, 6 July 1870 (PROV, unit 5, VPRS 5486/P0, Inward Correspondence. Official Letters, Miscellaneous, VA 913 Melbourne Public Library) (phytological exhibition); Report 1868 (note 39), 7 (lack of space). There are few sources to enable us to judge the impact of FM's phytological exhibition; the correspondence file is mainly about Mueller requesting assistance and excusing his delays, so that it may never have had the impact of the rest of the museum.

¹²⁴For Indian and Colonial, note 56. The Adelaide merit certificate is at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, Library, RB MSS M200.

¹²⁵Taylor (note 112), 133. See also the report of FM's vote of thanks to Halley: Victorian Naturalist, 2 (1885), 14–15.

¹²⁶Tom May and Sara Maroske, ‘Ferdinand von Mueller, Exhibitioner Extraordinaire’, Victorian Naturalist, 113 (1996), 143–45.

¹²⁷G. Coghill (nd) quoted by Taylor (note 112), 135.

¹²⁸Note 112, 131.

¹²⁹Sheila Houghton, ‘Baron von Mueller and the Victorian Naturalist’, Victorian Naturalist, 113 (1996), 140–142.

¹³⁰FM to William Thisleton-Dyer, 1 January 1881, RBGKM, 1871–/81, ff. 291_/4.

¹³¹FM to William Thisleton-Dyer, 3 November 1893 (Home et al. (note 19), III, 658.

¹³²Mueller ‘An Historical Review of the Explorations of Australia, Transactions of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria, 2 (1858), 148–68, 167.

¹³³ Report 1858 (note 20), 419.

¹³⁴FM to William Nicholson 12 February 1860 (PROV, N60/1423, unit 748, VPRS 1189/P inward registered correspondence, VA 475 Chief Secretary's Department.)

¹³⁵Annual report of the Government Botanist and Director of the Botanic Garden, In Victoria — Parliamentary Papers—Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly 1864–65, 4 (No. 72), cinchona, 6–7; tea, 6. For the probable excessive costs of cultivating tea, see also FM to William Nicholson, 12 May 1860 (Home et al. (note 19), II, 86–87).

¹³⁶In 1875, FM was acknowledged by the French acclimatizer C. Raveret-Wattel as ‘the genius who predicted the future of [Eucalyptus globulus], and so his own destiny’ (quoted by Robert Fyfe Zacharin, Emigrant Eucalypts: Gum Trees as Exotics (Melbourne, 1978), 57. For Ramel, see FM, Eucalyptographia: A Descriptive Atlas of the Eucalypts of Australia and the Adjoining Islands (1880), Decade 6, unpaginated entry for E. globulus; Victorian patent Number 897, 24 March 1866 for ‘A new method of preparing the leaves and bark of plants belonging to the genus eucalyptus, and of other plants of the family of myrtaceae, for the purpose of using them as tobacco and snuff’; Prosper Ramel to FM, 29 November 1869, Home et al. (note 19), II, 526.

¹³⁷FM, The Plants Indigenous to the Colony of Victoria. I Thalamiflorae (Melbourne, 1860–62). For examples of utilitarian comments, see 21 (Drimys aromatica), 108 (Geijera parviflora), 166 (Lavetera plebja), 220 (Antherosperma moschatum). FM, Eucalyptographia: a Descriptive Atlas of the Eucalypts of Australia and the Adjoining Islands, ten unpaginated decades (Melbourne, 1879–84).

¹³⁸A. M. Lucas, ‘Assistance at a Distance: George Bentham, Ferdinand von Mueller and the Production of Flora Australiensis’, Archives of Natural History, 30 (2003), 255–81, 273.

¹³⁹See, for example, FM to William Hooker 26 May 1861 (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Library, Colonial Floras, Kewensia, K9/655.59, ff. 49–53).

¹⁴⁰FM to Redmond Barry, 22 August 1866 (Home et al. (note 19), II, 37); FM's sketch, 373.

¹⁴¹Report 1868 (note 44)

¹⁴² Botanic Teachings (note 72), 5.

¹⁴³See Daniel Sullivan (teacher at Moyston State School) to FM, 1 December 1879 (RB MSS M19, Library, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne.) This ‘naming service’ was not restricted to teachers; see for example his correspondence with Jessie Hussey, described and excerpted by D. N. Kraehenbuehl, ‘Jessie Louisa Hussey’, in People and Plants in Australia, edited by D. J. Carr and S. G. M. Carr (Sydney, 1981), 388–98.

¹⁴⁴FM was fully aware that his work was impeded by lack of access to authentic specimens (see, for example, FM to William Hooker, 18 October 1853 (Home et al. (note 19), I, 168–69)). Lucas (note 138), 275 discusses the advantages accruing to FM by the return from Kew of FM's loaned specimens, now ‘authenticated’ by George Bentham during the preparation of Flora Australiensis (note 77).

¹⁴⁵For an early example, discussing the use of the fruit valves of Eucalyptus as a taxonomic character, see FM to William Hooker, 11 January 1857 (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Directors’ letters, vol. LXXIV, Australia Letters 1851–8, Letter No. 155). For a more general statement, see FM to William Hooker, 23 July 1861 (Home et al. (note 19), I, 106).

¹⁴⁶N. J. Taylor-Delahoy ‘Natural History Television—Fact or Fiction’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 58 (1986), 187–99; 189, 190–91.

¹⁴⁷The issues of authenticity and authority are discussed in A. M. Lucas, ‘Constructing knowledge from fragments of learning’ in Children's Informal Ideas in Science, edited by P. J. Black and A. M. Lucas (London,1993), 134–47. See also the criticisms of the UK Natural History Museum's ‘new exhibition policy’ by L. B. Halstead, ‘Wither the Natural History Museum?’ Nature, 275 (1978), 683.

¹⁴⁸Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (London, 1873), 392–93. Trollope's view was not universal among travellers: the English merchant banker, John Cross, wrote home to his mother in 1872 that he ‘went through the Botanical Gardens, which promise to be really very pretty’ in The Oxford Book of Australian Letters, edited by Brenda Niall and John Thompson (Melbourne, 1999), 89.

¹⁴⁹Helen Cohn and Sarah Maroske (note 47), 110.

¹⁵⁰FM to John MacPherson, 29 September 1869 (Home et al., note 19, II, 518–19).

¹⁵¹For youthful enthusiasm, see Johannes H. Voigt and Doris M. Sinkora, ‘Ferdinand (von) Müller in Schleswig-Holstein, or: the making of a scientist and of a migrant’, Historical Records of Australian Science, 11 (1996), 13–33 (20–21); for collecting behaviour, Augustus C. Gregory ‘Journal of the North Australian Exploring Expedition’, Journal the Royal Geographical Society, 28 (1858), 1–135, passim but especially 38, 90; for Todea, FM to Joseph Hooker, 9 February 1871, RBGKM, 1871–81, ff. 6–7.

¹⁵²For analyses of the use made of scientific knowledge by special interest groups in the late twentieth century, see S. M. Macgill, The Politics of Anxiety: Sellafield's Cancer Link Controversy (London, 1987) and David Layton, Edgar Jenkins, Sally Macgill and Angela Davey, Inarticulate Science: Perspectives on the Public Understanding of Science and some Implications for Science Education (Nafferton, 1993).